Sony Blames Anonymous for PlayStation Hack
Sony said today that the hack that took down the Playstation Network and exposed some 77 million users' personal and credit card information was the work of the hacking group Anonymous. It's touting, as proof, a file called "Anonymous" that it found on one of its servers, which contained the words "we are legion," one of the group's catch-phrases. The company revealed the evidence on its Playstation Blog after its representatives testified about the security breach before a congressional committee.
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Anonymous still denies responsibility for the attack on its Web site, as it has done since the breach started on April 22. In a lively conversation on its message board, it has not, so far, addressed the new evidence Sony published in its blog today. On its Facebook page, many angry Playstation users have already assigned blame to the amorphous organization. One comment from a supporter indicated the file could have been placed by anybody:
if you think Anonymous placed the "file" on the PSN try this out
right click on your desktop, make a new text file, name it anonymous, and type in the text file, "we are legion"
that done?
Anonymous has claimed responsibility for a number of idealogical attacks on organizations, such as its takedown of Paypal for blocking donations to Wikileaks last year. The group had threatened to bring down the Playstation Network after Sony settled a lawsuit with George "Geohot" Hotz, who first hacked into the network (in fact, that attack went down with limited success in early April).
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The group's weapon of choice is a dedicated denial of service attack, in which people flood a site with traffic until it crashes. Sony today said it was "the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack," which doesn't exactly sound like the group's MO. But you never know.
