Online vigilante group Anonymous has denied being behind an attack that led to the theft of personal data from around 77 million PlayStation users.
The secretive hacker collective had earlier been singled-out by Sony as the possible guilty party.
But a posting on Anonymous' blog said: Let's be clear, we are legion, but it wasn't us. You are incompetent Sony.
The electronics giant has offered compensation to users who suffer fraud as a result of the theft.
Earlier this week, Sony sent a letter to the US Congress accusing Anonymous of being involved in the attack.
Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack, said the letter, signed by Sony America boss Kazuo Hirai.
He said that Sony had found a file planted on its network labelled Anonymous and bearing the group's slogan, We are legion.
But Anonymous said that it had been framed by online thieves to throw law enforcement off track.
The group, which made headlines in December 2010 after it used software freely available over the internet to temporarily bring down the sites of MasterCard and Visa, said that its members were not credit card thieves.
Whoever broke into Sony's servers to steal the credit card info and left a document blaming Anonymous clearly wanted Anonymous to be blamed for the most significant digital theft in history, the statement read.
