Anonymous denies PlayStation hack

Activist group denies link with theft of up to 100m personal and credit card details, saying its aims are political The online activism group Anonymous has denied insinuations by Sony that it was involved in the hacker breaches of the PlayStation Network (PSN) and Online Entertainment (SOE) systems in which between 77m and 100m personal details were stolen, and potentially as many credit card details. The riposte was delivered in a letter published online soon after the corporation delivered a letter to US politicians in which it claimed that private investigators called in to examine the break-in had discovered a file entitled “Anonymous” and containing the words “We are Legion” – part of Anonymous’s slogan. The group issued a 900-word statement in which it insisted that it does not steal credit card data and that its aims are purely political – in marked contrast, it said, to its adversaries, who include Sony because of the action the company took against a number of users who had found ways around some protections built into the PlayStation 3 console. “Anonymous has never been known to have engaged in credit card theft,” the statement said. “Many of our corporate and governmental adversaries, on the other hand. have been known to have lied to the public about Anonymous and about their own activities.” It said that the credit card theft – which Sony said came about after four servers on its network spontaneously rebooted and began behaving “oddly” – did not fit Anonymous’s “modus operandi”: “Whoever did perform the credit card theft did so contrary to the ‘modus operandi’ and intentions of Anonymous. Public support is not gained by stealing credit card info and personal identities, we are trying to fight criminal activities by corporations and governments, not steal credit cards.” Anonymous is a loosely organised group of hackers of various levels of expertise with an onion-like structure, where the most experienced and skilled hackers work in the centre, widening to the less experienced but sympathetic “members” at the fringes. They organise themselves through online chatrooms; few members know each others’ real-life identities. Membership is international and probably includes a couple of thousand people at any time. In the past the group has targeted the Church of Scientology, Visa and Mastercard, and various middle Eastern governments in the pursuit of what it sees as transparency and individual liberty. Sony has also blamed Anonymous for carrying out a denial-of-service attack which made it difficult or impossible to spot the break-in because Sony’s engineers were trying to cope with the online attack that was knocking out their servers. The statement from Anonymous – which appears to have been authored by a number of people, but uses American spelling and grammar throughout – does not deal with the ramifications of the attack, and Sony’s assertion that it enabled the theft by distracting the security team. The timing of the break-in to Sony’s systems is unlikely to have been an accident; a malicious hacker could have used the attack by Anonymous as cover when the first break-in on 17 April was made. Anonymous had announced on 4 APril that it would attack Sony because the Japanese corporation decided to pursue legal action against George Hotz, who had discovered and then shared the “root key” of the PS3, which would mean that anyone could potentially play any game on it – including pirated ones. Anonymous insisted: “If a legitimate and honest investigation into the credit card is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable. While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our ‘leadership’ does not condone credit card theft. We are concerned with erosion of privacy and fair use, the spread of corporate feudalism, the abuse of power and the justifications of executives and leaders who believe themselves immune personally and financially for the actions they undertake in the name of corporations and public office.” The fact that Sony has said that the people who hacked its servers erased log files to cover their steps makes it look extremely unlikely that they would also have left a text file linking them back to Anonymous if that were their origin. Anonymous Sony Hacking Data and computer security Charles Arthur guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.