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Sony Officially Blames Anonymous For PSN Hack
H_Fisher writes "In a letter to Congress, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony's board of directors, blames hacker group Anonymous for making possible the theft of gamers' personal information. 'What is becoming more and more evident is that Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes,' Hirai wrote. He also indicated that Sony waited two days before notifying the FBI of the theft."
Sony said on Wednesday that Anonymous targeted it several weeks ago using a denial of service attack in protest of Sony defending itself against a hacker in federal court in San Francisco.
The attack that stole the personal data of millions of Sony customers was launched separately, while the company was distracted protecting itself against the denial of service campaign, Sony said.
Sony said it was not sure whether the organizers of the two attacks were working together.
So they know Anonymous DDOS'ed them, and Anonymous have admitted this too.
They also were attacked separately where the theft took place. They don't know if these groups were working together. They blame the latter on Anonymous too. How did they draw that final conclusion??
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I got a letter in the mail yesterday May 3rd advising me my info may have been hacked. Weird since I don't have a play station and have not played an online Sony game in over a decade (12 years maybe more) and then I canceled my subscription. Which brings me to a question why is information that old still being kept where it can be cracked?
Who scapegoated them?
A professional cyber cracker may well opt to take advantage of anonymous's wrath by leaving a frame job behind.
This story kind of gives me a chill. I mean, I do manage servers and for sure a "carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack" would come into my systems. I mean, security is relative. If someone wants to get in, they'll get in eventually. If Stuxnet did anything, it was to point that out.
Now, I'm not saying that this was sophisticated attack. I don't know. But the fact remains that any network/server can fall to this kind of stuff.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
So very this. I'd mod you up if I could.
The common and fashionable sentiment is "Anonymous is a scapegoat for the Sony Conspiracy" or "Sony just needs a scapegoat for their failure..." when the defense of Anonymous should be exactly as you stated: It's not their MO.
Anonymous, to date, has shown itself to be mischievous (sometimes malicious) and extremely precise in their targeting. They have never represented themselves to be a for-profit hacking crew and they're smart enough to know that such actions are hurting the innocent users more than the company. Thus, the copying of millions of accounts' financial information cannot rationally be tied to them on history alone.
I really don't think Anonymous did this and I think Sony just needs *a* target of blame ASAP. In my opinion, anonymous is a *scapegoat of convenience*, given their vocal opposition to the modding community.
Tinfoil Hat Time: Maybe a for-profit hacking crew executed this attack knowing Anonymous would be target #1, thus giving them sufficient smoke screen.
Hmmm...
Because there are different ways to approach the problem and heavy-handed lawyer-inflicted abuse makes you look like a total jerk.
Marcon hacks Wii and adds the "Homebrew Channel", which has never enabled piracy (although some others have built upon it to do so). Nintendo releases a firmware update. Marcon re-opens Homebrew Channel. Ninetendo releases another firmware update, which bricks a few Wiis on accident. Marcon re-opens Homebrew Channel and finds a way to un-brick some of the bricked Wiis. Nintendo pretty much just leaves the issue alone, not wanting to harm their customer base even more.
Note, at no time did Nintendo sue Marcon, remove features that were advertised with the product, etc. And when they realized their strategy was doing more harm than good, they backed off a little. Nintendo is still making a fortune off of Wii, BTW.
Contrast Sony. They said you could install Linux on your Playstation, but not use about half the hardware. GeoHot figures out how to use ALL the hardware. Instead of realizing what's best for everyone involved, in a control-freak driven rage they remove OtherOS. GeoHot casually puts it back. Sony removes it again, makes it so future firmware updates are forward-only, and requires all their game and BluRay partners to do a firmware check on all new releases. And they drag GeoHot into court on what should be freedom of speech. Then, they subpoena all visitors to GeoHot's website, everyone who ever gave him money, etc., etc., really making enemies of millions of unrelated people. All this in addition to their track record of installing a rootkit on customers' PCs when listening to music (a 5-10-year felony if you or I did it) and taking back purchases from thousands of customers and refusing to lift a finger to give them back.
Sony is NOT the victim here. And they are being punished for legitimate crimes (hacking, theft) by vigilante justice because the courts and governments haven't done their job.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Or it could be that Sony, fearing Anonymous attacks, had their engineers start running systematic security audits - and then discovered that PSN had been hacked months ago, but do well that it hadn't been noticed.