UPDATE:4/26/2011 Anonymous has decided to cease attacks on sony servers. They decided to stop stating they stick up for the consumers and to keep attacking sony servers would only contradict their beliefs. With that said the war between the two is still not over. Anonymous has stated that they are currently looking for alternate ways to attack Sony without disrupting the consumers in the manner that was done before. On another note, Anonymous has said that they while not compromise any credit card info they may have obtained in the attack.
As my fellow author michelle has said the playstation network may have in fact been cyberhacked my the infamous group “anonymous”. Now some of you may think why would they do that. Well little do many of you know much like big time games there is a very interesting and intense back story to all of this. It all started when Sony filed lawsuit after lawsuit against anonymous hackers Geohot and Graf_Chokolo. GeoHot, The iphone jailbreak creator, is being accused of disassembling the security systems and codes in the playstation and making them availiable on the internet allowing whoever possed the knowledge to make homemade applications for their Playstations. Anonymous did not take kindly to this lawsuit claiming Sony is abusing the judicial system in an attempt to cover up how their product works. They claim GeoHot did nothing wrong as he was only experimenting with HIS playstation. They also stated that he never signed into psn with his console so no terms of service were ever accepted from his part. Anonymous officially warned Sony a few weeks before the attack with an image on their website that stated the lawsuits were “deemed wholly unforgivable” and warned them of the wrath of Anonymous. On Wednesday of last week psn players began to see this wrath as all their online capabilities began to crumble under the control of Anonymous. However this wasn’t nor is it the end. Anonymous has also teamed up with SonyRecon and OpSony hacker groups for the attack on Sony. They also have targeted Sony employees who were considered useful to them by finding everything from phone numbers to home addresses to their relatives names. Both SonyRecon and OpSony however have seemed to take on the task of targeting those involved in the case of GeoHot, with many member of OpSony actually singling out the judge in charge of the case. Sony has since hired Prolexic, a company who mainly specializes in defeating DDoS attacks - The kind of attacks Anonymous used to take down Sony. While they have managed to keep Anonymous at bay the hacker group not seemed to be shaken at all. Anon member Takai contacted the author at playstationlifestyles.net - the author who first covered the story. Takai had a few things to say about Prolexic and Sony. When pressed about if they would take out Prolexic Takai stated,
“well, if I had to put money on it… I’d say Prolexic is going down like a two dollar Wh**e in a Nevada chicken ranch”
but also congratulated them for doing so well. Takai then warned that Anonymous has its own ways of dealing with Prolexic. While it began to seem like the PSn attack was their biggest target Takai made it clear that it was not stating:
So far, all Sony has seen from us is poking and prodding. A simple salute to let them know, we’re coming. Make no mistake, what you saw today and thought to be frustration is merely preparation for what’s to come. We said, expect us. Counting us out, would be a mistake. ;)”
Later he said:
For the sake of not shooting ourselves in the foot, I won’t comment on specific operational tactics we may or may not employ here. I will however say, that if Sony thinks LOIC is the only trick in our hat … they’re in for a hell of a wake up call. We’re really going all out for this one.
There are many different faces to the operation. Something we encourage is creative thinking
Consumers however are caught in the middle. On one hand Anonymous is saying that they are sticking up for consumers but on the other many gamers are left without their online access. One thing we do know is that this war is far from over and for Sony the worst is yet to come