You may have read on Tuesday how Sony has admitted that its PlayStation Network gamers' personal details have been accessed by the hackers who have brought the online gaming portal to its knees.

Now, in the face of much criticism from both gamers and the tech industry as a whole, Sony has attempted to defend its position but has, as a result, simply made it seem worse than it already was.

For you see, in Sony's attempt to defend the amount of time it took for it to come clean about the data compromise it has, in effect, admitted just how slow it was to realise that an personal intrusion had taken place - almost a week.

The statement on the PlayStation Blog reads:

"There’s a difference in timing between when we identified there was an intrusion and when we learned of consumers’ data being compromised. We learned there was an intrusion 19 April and subsequently shut the services down. We then brought in outside experts to help us learn how the intrusion occurred and to conduct an investigation to determine the nature and scope of the incident. It was necessary to conduct several days of forensic analysis, and it took our experts until yesterday to understand the scope of the breach. We then shared that information with our consumers and announced it publicly yesterday evening."

Sony's experts therefore took around six days to identify the scope of the issue. Ouch.

Sony is going to have to pull something pretty amazing out of the hat if it is to rescue what is turning into a nightmare scenario for the Japanese giant.

An Xbox LIVE subscription never looked so appealing....