Slashdot Mirror
Sony Music Greece Falls To Hackers
xsee writes "Hackers: 6, Sony: 0. It appears an attacker has performed a SQL injection attack against SonyMusic.gr. The latest attack has exposed usernames, real names, email addresses and more. Is Sony's network being used as the world's largest public penetration test?"
The most preventable of all security holes. How sad.
Time to sell short Sony stocks while we are at it.
New Economic Perspectives
Isnt every network exposed to the public (esp. mid size or larger commercial ones) continously under attempted attack?
Years of half baked products, poor reliability, hostile customer service, lazy innovation, and a general disdain for security are what your customers have had to deal with. I really don't care who is doing it to you or why - but I applaud them teaching you the hard lessons of the evolving technological age. You can't keep repeatedly flipping people the finger anymore and tell them to deal with it. Evolve or die. And no, my loathing isn't related to just the recent PS3 debacle. It extends to experiences with consumer audio, professional theatrical projection equipment, and so on right down the line. The fact that you're being taken out by the simplest of attacks in most cases just makes my smile grow a little more.
The Application String Interface was a poor idea from the start. It's the 21st century, we shouldn't be building strings to do DB queries.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
i'm sorry, but was the phrase: "world's largest public penetration test?" really necessary?
Well at least they are consistent - none of their systems seem to have more than basic security.
K Man
And you're egging them on?
They aren't just doing this to Sony, they're doing this to the people who use the services too.
Take it from a person had a gawker account. When they were hacked, it caused a great inconvenience for me.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Is there any evidence to back this up? I keep thinking of counter examples, the best one being Sony. They've been attacked how many times now, and they are still leaving security holes of this nature up? One would think after the first attack a company wide IT effort to harden their servers would have been given something other than the lowest priority...
Established company seeking security professionals, all positions open
They decided that since people download stuff anyways, might as well save on the bandwidth and store it locally. Any time you download a file its mirrored in the cafes file server, so others can copy it without having to re-download.
And if you dont go that route, you can buy bootleg copies from any number of African immigrants on the street for just a few euro. Many times for better quality than available in stores for retail price.
The linked article also provides a screen shot with obscured personal information.
It appears the passwords are stored in plain text, not as hash: formatting makes it unclear but it seems the length varies, and the password fields are short (6-10 characters or so), while hashes are much longer than that.
Bad bad security! No wonder they also fall victim to the age-old SQL injection attack... which I thought most SQL interface libraries can automatically intercept by adding the appropriate escaping... many years ago I used Pythons MySQLdb and they were doing that for very very long already... so there should be no excuse for allowing this to happen still.
Evidently, the playstation 3 firmware/network isn't the only instance where sony totally fails at securing their shit. SQL injection? Really? In this day and age? I'm simply shocked that it hasn't happened a lot earlier; they've been pissing people off for years now, its amazing its taken this long for a collective group to make a serious effort to try and break in.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
No, every other scriptkiddie is just joining in on teh lulz of flogging the dead horse. "ZOMG I sql injectioned a SONY site! Yeah, it's got nothing to do with PS3 or PSN, and yeah it's some site in Greece, but lulz amirite!?"
It's even in the bloody article, isn't it?
I mean.. honestly?
They could be running this against $random_site and try to hit the news with it, too.. but they wouldn't.. because nobody cares about a random hack at a random site right now.. but if it's got SONY attached to it.. well.. lulz rules the news.
None of which excuses the poor security.. but none of which excuses the submitter from his choice of words either.
SONY now knows 1 good thing from this: How to stop it from happening again on this and other sites/domains they own & host websites from.
How to stop this particular attack.
Available evidence suggests they have no shortage of dailyWTF-worthy screwups that people can continue to exploit.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
SONY now knows 1 good thing from this: How to stop it from happening again on this and other sites/domains they own & host websites from.
Well, if the recent weeks told us one thing then that they do NOT learn anything from the penetrations. PSN was penetrated and they took it down, but it seems they didn't really learn much from it, since SOE followed. PSN went back up, only to be torn down again near instantly because it was AGAIN penetrated with an allegedly similar attack. And now that. An SQL injection, the one attack that can be prevented the easiest and with the least hassle (hell, there's even free frameworks for nearly every script language in the world that do it automatically for you).
I'd say if one thing's certain, then that Sony doesn't learn jack from the attacks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I suspect that it will be a while before we see a real fix to the SQL injection problem as well.
It's called a paramterized query and pretty much every language on the planet supports this mechanism.
SQL injection is mostly a solved problem, except for programmers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I almost feel bad for Sony.
Almost.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
*facepalm*
Actually, I think it's Lisa Sparxxx at 919 guys.
Don't even bother with the Sony TVs. They do make some nice TVs, but so do Samsung and Sharp (Aquos anyway, their budget sets don't hold the same value proposition) for quite a bit less money. I can't think of a single line of Sony products that doesn't butt up against better and cheaper competition. They are just coasting and selling the name to people old enough to have bought their first nice TV 20+ years ago when Sony actually gave a crap.
When I was shopping for TVs last year the Sony was one of the better ones for input lag. Not great mind you. The Aquos was great for input lag but had terrible sharpening artifacts. It was like watching a cheap and cheerful Chinese brand TV and I couldn't stand it in the store so I didn't buy it. Samsung has become awful for input lag - as in unplayable on a console.
I ended up with the Sony 55ex500. Not a bad tele but some annoyances. Definitely would do better with a second tuner as the guide sucks, and some annoying bugs on the menu (like most recently watched channels don't work). Apart from these 2 annoyances and first unit replaced due to dead pixels in the first week, the TV has been trouble free and served my young family well. Great sound and picture (with minor tweaking to set up). Great fun with the Wii. Fantastic Bluray. Lots of inputs. (Some slight picture stutter in full res panning for some titles, even with 100Mhz gimmick, but livable). And it was the cheapest of the bunch. The geek in me also hates that you can't downgrade firmware - new firmware always a risk with the tele. If I could find better I would have bought it. I have no love of Sony.
What was striking was how bad input lag had gotten on most models, and how quality had gone down even quicker than price for all manufacturers. Few now have decent dead pixel policies.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Heh heh, Sony's gettin' shafted!
This never gets old to me.
http://xkcd.com/327/
it was AGAIN penetrated with an allegedly similar attack.
This is not true, The secondary attack was just resetting passwords from users that did not reset their password yet, made possible by the data stolen (email & date of birth) from PSN hack earlier. I saw this comming the second I read sony would force every user to change their password on first logon.
No more than HB Gary was.
To wit: This is the prescription for being attacked mercilessly, for months on end:
At that point you will discover what sort of damage a bunch of really pissed off top notch programmers can do.
With luck all the other psychopathic mega corporations around the world are watching and learning. The lesson is simple: don't poke a hornets nest.
Poor Sony.
Maybe if they cared as much about their customers as they do about profits and making money, this could have been avoided or at least negotiated. But now it's out of control. It's game over.
The hackers aren't going to stop. Sony needs to hire cyber warriors.
One of the first things you learn about web programming is to clean any string a user touches. If there's even a remote possibility that a user submitted something, clean it before putting it in your query. How is it even possible that someone would be given money for web programming before learning this? That's not even a rhetorical question; I'm genuinely interested in the answer.
It's cheaper not to hire or pay for information security.
And when they do they probably don't hire the best. Let's face it, Sony is not innocent and I could care less what happens to Sony. I don't own Sony stock, I don't work for Sony, and I don't own any Sony products except for an old PSX. So I just don't care what happens to Sony.
Maybe other companies will now give a shit about information security.
+1 indeed. I too got a bad taste in my mouth when they got into the content production business. Back then I think it was their purchase of Columbia Records that started their downhill slide. Before that they used to make cool hardware and the fought many moons ago for consumer rights and the right to build unencumbered consumer hardware. I Remember getting Sony Style catalogs etc and wanting everything in it. I recommended and Sold many a Sony product over the years and now will not touch a Sony product nor recommend/sell their products to anyone.
... is vulnerable... ' ; SELECT * FROM master.dbo.tables; DROP DATABASE master;
And to get a digital movie to play also requires security clearances and internet passwords, it won't simply play on any projector, you need to get it authorized. So not changing the lens at the same time is a problem with incompetence or sloth.
No, it isn't the Sony DRM giving customers an inferior product, it is the theaters. Analog projection showed us they don't really see image quality as a big factor in their business success. You were lucky to get a projector with the film held steady in the gate, well lit and in focus, so is it a surprise theaters don't take their responsibilities any more seriously for digital?
As a person who is sensitive to flicker (a bit) and to jumpy film images, I have to say the rock-steady images of digital (and with quite even brightness usually too!) is not an inferior product. It's a greatly superior product. I don't know who is making the projectors I'm seeing though, could be Sony, could be anybody.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
...they used my scanner. It would be so fitting. Sony BMG Greece hacked by a vulnerability found by a scanner written by a Greek dude.
That would be completely worth the development effort.
I'm going to stop being a blatant sony fanboy and defend the ridiculous shit they've done, but, only six?
between PSP releases 1.50 and 6.20, there's way more than just six points for the hacker team.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Obviously a parameterised[sic] query prevents the most obvious forms of injection attack, but it alone does not protect against everything. Although it can be tedious, all data returned in forms should really be checked for syntactical legitimacy. Apart from anything else, this makes it easy to distinguish between accident and malice, and so know when to pop up a box saying "please check that the contents of each box make sense before clicking Submit" and when to put up a 404 and block the IP for a while. On a large commercial website, the development cost per submission is quite low, and failing to validate data is a stupid corner to cut.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
http://pastebin.com/WqLysjiN
If these is actually an excerpt of the actual data, then it looks like test data for me. Look at the passwords. They repeat a lot but grouped with ascending order. For example in the middle of the file there are a lot of "123456" passwords, but nowhere else. As the data seems to be ordered by u_usr this seems to be very unlikely.
And to get a digital movie to play also requires security clearances and internet passwords, it won't simply play on any projector, you need to get it authorized.
The normal theater staff have the authorizations for that, though. I'm not sure what Sony, theater chain or distributor policy is on giving access to projector innards, and I suspect this is a closely guarded secret.
endlessly
ftfy
Yes... yes it was... as it was funny as shit. :)
Stone
Think about it.
There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
But he could care less: He could care so little that he wouldn't even bother to post about how little he cares about it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In the Robin Hood stories, Little John was actually a rather large person.
Anybody who trusts Sony after all the various customer-rapings Sony has committed in the last ten or fifteen years deserves to have their data stolen.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. If you buy Sony you're begging to be abused.
Free Martian Whores!
How is that new PR plan going?
was it really a good idea to make everyone hate you?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
One user, when he registered in Sony's site, entered this "8elo pl na ma8o pios diavazei ayta ta e-mail" which is greek for "i would really like to know who's reading these emails".
There's no patch for stupidity
sql injection? since it's a greek site maybe they were only worried about... trojan horses?
sag
It comes from the full phrase "I know naught and could care less." So when people say they could care less, they mean they could care less than naught. People who are unfamiliar with the classics hear "I could care less," and get confused and angry because they aren't familiar with the actual quote. But their anger just displays their ignorance. "I could care less" is the original and correct, and "I couldn't care less" is the ignorant "correction."
Little Bobby Tables' mom strikes again.
"The knee is the elbow of the leg." -- My wife
Ok, I don't care very much at all. That still leaves plenty of room to care even less. Am I right? Besides saying "I could care less", sounds way cooler than I could care even less. It just rolls off the tongue so well that it has become the way to express this particular sentiment. This is about the Cool Hand Luke factor not being technically accurate.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
The original phrase is "You know nothing and you care less, as people say." (Mansfield Park (1815), which precedes the usage of "couldn't care less" by about 130 years ("couldn't care less" became a popular phrase in the 1940s). It's the people who think they're being grammatically correct who are wrong on this one.
I could care more but I find myself caring less. Could not you just say I couldn't care less?
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
Sony just doesn't get it. They don't know how to do business online. The internet has been a pain in the side of their movie and record labels, so Sony neglects it as much as they can get away with and this is what happens.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
What I find most intriguing in all of this is that "security of their product" is more important than the "security of their customers information". I mean seriously how many millions did SONY spend on securing their music, videos, and other "media". I forget what device it was but I remember my last SONY product was one where the data could only be read by a SONY reader... I think it was a voice recorder I bought for a client. None the less, their products are secured from the user, but the user is not secured at all. Maybe if they spent the money they wasted on DRM on securing their network and innovating like they did in the past they would be a viable company, but i guess that being greedy got in the way of their profits. Didn't they recently try and jail/sue some kid for modding his PS3? I mean seriously, shame on you SONY. Get your house in order and try to remember that your customers wants and needs dictate your ability to do business. Your profits will soar if you bring back your old ways of being innovative, delivering quality and most importantly delivering what the customers want. Your lawyers and money guys should be the ones jailed for your pathetically weak grip on reality. Forcing people to buy your crap will never equate to growth... instead it will be a slow downward spiral like a dookie in a toilet bowl. On the topic of DRM also, wasn't it sony who's profits soared through blank cassettes? That was thinking outside the box and winning on both sides of the coin. DRM, suing modders, proprietizing every piece of media (ie: mini-disk, memory stick, etc) is certainly the fastest way to the bottom of the bowl. JMHO As for HiFi audio, SONY never peaked my interest... I went Denon long ago and ill prolly never go back.
What goes around, comes around.
Hackers: 6, Sony customers: 0
Let's not lose sight of who's actually being hurt here.
Visit the
Hmm. I think that the result is two phrases that are both OK.
"I couldn't care less" is a perfectly reasonable, grammatically and logically 'true' statement (if said truthfully.
"I could care less" is a shorthand phrase derived from a longer original phrase. It can also be considered as assuming a prepended "as if", which adequately describes its ironic character.
So, they're both right! :D
Of course, I could[n't] care less. :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
You might be interested to know, that i received a failing grade in a post-secondary essay, in large part because the *english* teacher was insistent that the correct term was 'could care less' .. over my protestations.. my insistence that *he* needed a refresher is what led to the less than stellar grade (!)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Whoever modded me down as redundant really should have noticed that my post was 40 minutes before the other one. The other just happened to be in response to one of the first threads posted. Bah, oh well!