Sony said it plans to restore by this weekend PlayStation Network services worldwide except in Japan, Hong Kong and South Korea, after being targeted in a massive online attack in April.

The electronics and entertainment giant said users in the Americas and Europe and much of Asia will again be able to buy and download games online, and will also receive “welcome back” packs of services and content. The company said that since being hacked in April, it had “implemented considerable security enhancements to the network infrastructure, as well as conducted testing of the payment process and commerce functions”. Sony was attacked in one of the biggest data breaches since the advent of the Internet, in which the user names, passwords, addresses and birth dates of more than 100 million people may have been compromised.

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