THE NEWS WRAP: Sony suffers second security breach in a matter of weeks

Woolworths’ new hardware brand will be called ‘Masters’, the supermarket giant has revealed.

The company said that its first Masters store will open in September or October in Melbourne’s west. The launch of the brand is Woolworths’ attempt to take on Wesfarmers-owned Bunnings in the $42 billion hardware market, although some small business groups are concerned that the move will strip income from smaller operators. 

Sony suffers second security breach

Sony has suffered its second security breach in a matter of weeks, shutting down its online gaming platform after a hacker gained access to the system.

In a statement, the company said: “In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately.”

Two weeks ago, Sony’s PlayStation network and its Qriocity music service were compromised by hackers, exposing the personal information of 77 million users.

Twitter record broken by bin Laden death

The growing importance of Twitter has again been underlined following news of the death of Osama bin Laden.

Not only was the news of bin Laden’s killing broken on the micro-blogging site, it has been revealed that a new ‘tweet per second’ record was set in the wake of the news. There were 3,000 tweets per second during a four-hour period yesterday, with the total rising to 5,000 tweets per second following US president Barack Obama’s speech announcing the al-Qaeda leader’s death.

Overnight

Bin Laden’s demise provoked a brief rally in US stocks, only for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to eventually finish 16.27 points down, ending on 12,794.27. The Australian dollar hit a new high of 110.11 US cents before falling back slightly.