A Note on Anonymous and Sony

Any current Playstation user has now become intimately familiar with the above screen for the past two weeks. Sony seems to consistently imply that they believe that Anonymous, a organization of hackivists that are known for their DDoS attacks and have defaced a few websites in their days, hacked their website and stole the user details of some 77 million people and few thousand European credit cards. First of all, Anonymous doesn't really have a history of showing any desire to steal individual information for malicious. Sony claims that one of the hackers left a file on their servers labeled 'Anonymous' which contained "We are Legion." Most likely, that was just a diversion tactic by the hackers to focus the attention away from finding the actual hackers but to put a focus on finding members of Anonymous. Plus, for a hack this large, who would incriminate themselves like this. Anonymous' credo isn't really about screwing over individual innocent people, they're more about going after corporations and organizations. Sony also claims because of Anonymous' DDoS on Sony, it allowed the malicious hackers to get into the network with ease while Sony was dealing with the DDoS attack. The DDoS didn't enable anything. Those hackers would have been able to get into those servers whether or not that DDoS attack took place. In fact, it probably would have made the cracking process faster. Anonymous actually stands up for a few causes that most people would probably agree with. They are currently working on projects to hinder hate groups and white supremacists websites.

Hands down, It is very disappointing that Sony had these lacking network security standards. Sony's network standards are sure to improve from this situation, at least we can hope. Sony continues to have superior hardware when it comes to their PS3. Sony will improve some of its practices and make their products stand out and hopefully infuriate less people. Sony will ultimately recover from this. Besides, Sony seems to be doing fairly well in the reparations department. They are offering identity protection for a year, really decent protection in fact. Plus, they are offering a trial to Playstation Plus and possibly a free game or two. Now, we can just wait for the network to come online and enjoy our single player games in the interim. This outage should be an opportunity to be more productive anyway. One could ride a bike, go somewhere interesting, or redesign their website.

Image from http://gameolosophy.com/games/playstation-network-undergoing-maintenance-after-reportedly-being-targeted-by-anonymous/