Sony Ericsson's Canadian eShop web site remains down after a hacking attack compromised the personal information of 2,000 users.

The eShop sites are where Sony Ericsson sells its phones and services. This comes on the heels of a massive security breach of Sony's PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment That breach compromised the information of nearly 100 million accounts, including credit card information. Another security breach occurred on Sony's Greek site. The PlayStation and Qriocity networks are still down, but Sony said it will restore them by month's end.

In this case, the information the hackers got to was the names, emails and hashes of passwords to the accounts. Sony Ericsson Spokeswoman Ivette Lopez said no credit card information was taken. She added that the attack was on a server that is maintained in Canada by another company contracted to Sony Ericsson.

Sony Ericsson disabled the ecommerce site on Tuesday and Lopez said there isn't a definite timetable yet for bringing it back up. Currently the site displays the message D'Oh! The page you are looking for has gone walkabout. Sorry.

Details of the kind of attack that breached Sony Ericsson's defenses were posted on The Hacker News web site. The posting said that a Lebanese hacker, Idahc, had used an SQL injection. An SQL injection involves sending code to another computer (often through a web site) that changes the way the host computer handles a database. Often the code is sent through special characters that the receiving computer sees as commands rather than ordinary data such as a user name.

While the passwords are hashed -meaning that they are rendered as strings of characters that would have to be decoded in order to be used. While doing so isn't impossible, it is difficult.

Sony Ericsson hasn't yet estimated the cost of fixing the problem and dealing with the hacking attack. Sony, the parent company, said recently that the security breach of the PlayStation Network could cost about $171 million, cutting its fiscal 2011 profit margins.

Sony Canada Electronics Sony