Sony to Blame “Anonymous” for Successful Attacks on its Networks

Sony’s problems are far from over, but at least PlayStation Network subscribers finally getting some of the in-depth answers they have been waiting for. Sony has been on the defensive with its customers about the gravity of the situation. It took Sony over a week to inform customers that personal data had been stolen.

During investigation security experts discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of Sony`s Online Entertainment servers named “Anonymous” with the words “We are Legion.”

The hacker group Anonymous claimed responsibility for an outage earlier in April but later denied having a hand in this latest event. Given Sony’s testimony, it would seem that Anonymous was in fact involved this time around. However, Sony has refrained from stating outright that the group is responsible. It also does not cite Anonymous as the direct culprit for the latest security vulnerability in which an additional 24.6 million accounts were exposed. But given the calling card left on the server, it’s hard to believe that Anonymous didn’t have some part in this

“Just weeks before, several Sony companies had been the target of a large-scale, coordinated denial of service attack by the group called Anonymous,” Kazuo Hirai wrote. “The attacks were coordinated against Sony as a protest against Sony for exercising its rights in a civil action in the United States District Court in San Francisco against a hacker.”

The sophistication of the PSN attackers, combined with the continuing DDoS attacks, made it hard for Sony admins to detect the compromise, which has resulted in the wholesale theft of personally identifiable information associated with 77 million accounts. Almost two weeks into the investigation of the hack, Sony learned that Station.com, its PC games site, was also breached, resulting in theft of PII associated with an additional 25 million accounts.

At least some of the PSN services are back online again, such as Music Unlimited, but not everything is back to normal yet. The way things are going for Sony lately, it’s likely that the PlayStation Network and Online Entertainment services won’t be normal again for a very long time.