Today brought bad news for some Asian customers of Sony, after a group calling itself “Null\Crew” attacked the entertainment giant’s mobile communication servers. A Sony spokesman confirmed that cyber thieves had taken information belonging to 400 customers in mainland China and Taiwan.

The information taken by Null\Crew – which reportedly has links to Anonymous – and posted online includes online usernames, emails and some passwords. In addition to customer information, the hackers also posted a message critical of the Japanese firm:

“Sony, we are dearly disappointed in your security… Not even your customers can trust you.”

The hackers also claimed to have gained control of eight Sony servers.

What may be more of a warning or lesson here is the fact that the servers from which the client details were stolen actually belonged to an unnamed third-party. Whether you are storing your own personal data, or information that belongs to clients or customers, using a third-party to store that data does pose risks.

In this case, it seems as if the company used by Sony did not come up to the mark in terms of security, and as a result Sony faces yet another embarrassing episode. In April 2011, a massive data breach that compromised over 100 million accounts forced Sony to temporarily shut down its PlayStation Network and Qriocity services.

However, even genuine accidents can happen without any intervention from hackers or data thieves – that’s just life. Make sure you don’t place all of your critical data in one cloud storage locker where it could just as easily be accidentally deleted as it could be stolen. If you need to make private files available to a number of people, a private sharing network might be a better option than third-party cloud storage.