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Sony's Plan To Tighten Security and Fight Hacktivism
mask.of.sanity writes "Sony Entertainment Network is rebuilding its information security posture to defend against hacktivism. It includes a security operations center that serves as a nerve center collating information on everything from staff phone calls, to CCTV, to PlayStation gamers. If it is successful, the counter intelligence-based system will be deployed across the entire company. 'At Sony, we are modifying our programs to deal less with state-sponsored [attacks] and more with socially-motivated hackers. It will be different,' said Chief Security Officer Brett Wahlin."
good for them
pity I wont buy another sony product ever again.
Don't be dicks.
Hacktivism is to protest political ends. I belive the term is misused here...
As part of the society, you should think about how not to become a target of hacking activism. Especially when it's impossible to crush every one of the "hackers".
Better yet, convert them into your loyal customers, and even better, direct their anger to your competitors.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Here's a start:
1. Bring back OtherOS
2. Stop supporting CSS, AACS, HDCP and other forms of DRM
3. Apologise for installing rookits on people's computers without their knowledge
4. Apologise for taking legal action against people who circumvented their digital restrictions
NATO just dropped a few billion for one! Now SONY will have one! Where's yours!?!?!
I smell Y2k sized contract money now!
I am now a Anti-Cyber-Threat-Security-Response-Operations-Analysis-Coordination-Center Specialist!
In the train:
Passenger: "What line of work are you in?"
Me: "Cyber Security!"
Passenger: "Do I need that?"
Me: "Does your wife know about the email to your girlfriend on your laptop that I am reading right now?"
Passenger: "Ok, I'll buy some."
Passenger: "But do I need to wear that tinfoil hat . . . ?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That is, stop playing DVD, Blu-Rays, and drop the ability to connect to HDMI and DVI displays?
That's the point, come up with a frickin' format that does not use DRM and distribute movies in said format (Sony is a mayor distributor and user of DRM'd formats).
If you don't like the above mentioned technologies, you can play unprotected media and connect the PS3 via SCART, VGA or component cables anyway.
We know you love your PS3, but why do the rest of us have to put up with crippled discs we want to play elsewhere?
It's not that Sony, like Google, is plotting to insert DRM into the open standard that governs the Web.
No, because they've already inserted their DRM everywhere that matters to them.
Done. Seven years ago. And by the way, did Apple and other phone manufacturers issue any apology for installing CarrierIQ...
Interesting that you'd pick the one company by name that was the least weasel-worded about what it did and didn't use CarrieIQ for.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit
Never forget, never forgive.
And who, pray tell, decides what is legitimate?
Answering that question is what politics is all about. The point of engaging in politics is to determine legitimacy. Look at any political movement and you will see this struggle to define legitimacy. Legitimacy is not the starting point: it is the outcome. You are begging the question.
Which is, of course, because you are trying to propagate your definition of what is legitimate. You are not describing politics: you are engaged in it. You are not a disinterested obsever: you are a participant.
TFA claims that Sony's new CSO, Brett Wahlin, "served as a counter-intelligence officer in the US Military for eight years during the Cold War." The final year of the cold war is generally agreed to be 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. This suggests he started working as a C-I officer no later than 1984. Yet the photo in his recent bio suggests he's in his early 40s now. So either 1) he's a prodigy and worked for the US military during high school, or 2) he can travel in time. Either way, the hacktivists might have met their match! Well played, Sony.
Why not orient your company and your policies so as not to actively piss off people who like tinkering with their own electronics and people who don't like DRM and spyware-riddled merchandise?
Political activists use legitimate methods to increase their influence.
So Rosa Parks wasn't an activist when she sat on the whites-only seat on the bus? Her entire point was that what should have been legitimate wasn't. Activism isn't about increasing your influence (that's more NGO territory - lobbying for a good cause), it's about bringing public attention to your cause. Very often the most effective way of doing that is publicly defying the rules to make a point.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
There's sonmething new from Sony you absolutely MUST have.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Evidently Sony learned nothing from the cause/effect relationship of their brutal approach to both security and their users. Sony set the stage by deploying rootkits and other security attacks on their own customers. Then they retroactively deleted the Linux (OtherOS) option from PS3s, many of which they'd sold to hackers for the very purpose of "hacking Sony". Though OtherOS had been crippled from the beginning, there was little effort by PS3 hackers to crack the lockout from the hardware, until Sony tried shutting all OtherOS users down. Then hacking the PS3 became necessary for every PS3 Linux user.
It was a case of "when guns (OtherOSes) are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (OtherOSes)". Why stop at just keeping what you paid for, when you had actually paid for more than you'd originally gotten? Sony had destroyed any ethical relationship, and the community was organized.
Now, I'm not pinning all or even most of the attacks on Sony beyond keeping Linux on the small PS3 Linux community - maybe not even any of them. But that episode showed the world Sony was a legitimate target. Then after some success in keeping what they paid for resulted in arresting the hacker, Sony was now a legit target for both legitimate hacking and just plain "bash the bad guy". Combine that with Sony's copyright overreaches, its region-encoding scams, its DVD backup denials (also broken and showing Sony both greedy and vulnerable) - Sony fanned the flames of backlash.
Now Sony is just escalating the conflict. It would be a lot cheaper to give hackers back Linux, this time with some support, to give them more of a common interest with Sony. Instead Sony is further defining itself as an enemy instead of a partner. Sony's awareness of social networks seems to be purely as either enemy or marketing victim. This will not end well. In fact it will not end, and many will suffer.
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make install -not war