Breaking News: Sony has confirmed that they have evidence that Anonymous was behind the attack. Sony claims that the only thing they could find in pointing to who was responsible for the attack was a file named “Anonymous” containing the words “We are legion” written inside of the file found on their servers.
Breaking News: Anonymous responds and claims they had nothing to do with attack. Is this Anon getting framed by Sony or Anon simply realizing they might land in hot water for the attack? Read more about it here.
Also check: Banks and governments around the world are responding to biggest hack in history. Read about it here.
On April 17th 2011, Sony fell victim to the largest data security breach in history. The PlayStation Network’s 77 million customers had their credit card information, passwords, location details and personal details exposed and the network has been down ever since. Last night Sony revealed that an additional 25 million Sony Online Entertainment users’ data has also been compromised in this attack. How did all of this happen?
Sony has not revealed any new information regarding who was responsible for this attack but earlier this year a group of hackers called Anonymous declared war on Sony. Anonymous is a group of hackers that rose to international notoriety when it waged cyber war against any organization that opposed WikiLeaks. Those attacks were all largely DDOS attacks, different to the type of attacks we have seen here with Sony.
Sony made themselves a target for hackers when it bullied a young hacker named GeoHot after he had hacked their PS3 console. Sony has been waging a perceived war against people tampering with their consoles by raiding homes and using excessive legal force against them. In other words Sony’s hard line on hackers tampering with their consoles has resulted in an endless onslaught on Sony by hackers from around the world.
At the end of the day Sony seems to have been it’s own worst enemy, it’s networks are highly insecure and it’s technology has gaping vulnerabilities. Instead of addressing their problems, instead they decided to bully individual hackers. The result of this lack of thinking from the top at Sony has now resulted in them being caught in a potentially devastating position for their company.
It’s not easy to predict the outcome to Sony’s very own version of the BP oil spill, all we can imagine is that the consequences are going to be serious. Looming in Sony’s near future are millions of dollars in legal battles, fines from governments around the world and the threat of 102 million users walking out on the technology giant. Not even to mention the amount of lost business as a result of the down time to its network and bad publicity.
