Less than two weeks before the most recent attack,Anonymous members launched a denial of serviceattack against the PlayStation Network in protest atSony’s legal pursuit of hacker George Hotz. Hotz hadmodified the firmware of a PlayStation 3 so that itcould run the Linux OS. Sony claimed the software violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits the reverse-engineering of encryption protections.
While there may be no relation to this attack, the Sony network has also been targeted by the Internet group Anonymous,” said Hirai. “In addition, the personal information on Sony’s top management, including the names of their children, the schools they attend, and the names of other family members, has been published on the Internet. They have also called for protests outside Sony stores around the world.” Hirai said the company hadn’t been able to find any link between Anonymous and the latest attack.
The dispersed Internet-based group had already claimed it had nothing to do with the attack.
In a posting on a website titled “For Once We Didn’t Do It,” the group said its core had not targeted Sony or the PlayStation Network. But the denial left open the possibility that individuals from the group might have been responsible.
Hotz, the hacker targeted by Sony, also denied any link with the attack. “I’m not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door,” he wrote in a blog post. “Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user info is not cool.”
