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Friday, May 6, 2011

Anonymous & PSN

A fellow blogger last night commented on my Anonymous Wallpaper, where a made a short follow-up comment. This post is to shed a little more light.


The reason Anonymous has become such a high suspect in the Playstation Network case is due to their major support of a Hacker (Hacker, NOT Cracker) named George Francis Hotz (a.k.a. Geohot, million75, or mil), who created custom firmware and reverse engineered a PS3 to run his own Linux Kernel. He is most known for jail-breaking the iPhone to be able to run on carriers besides AT&T. Geohot and Sony settled the lawsuit out of courst, Geohot allowing access to his Paypal account so Sony could get the I.P. address of every individual who visited his blog detailed his engineering efforts on the PS3, and for him to promise to stop all similar activities.


Even after matters were settled, Sony being "Happy" and Geohot "Glad" the fighting was over, Anonymous declared war against Sony for principles of Open-Source it broke by going after Geohot.


Now, this is where things get questionable. While members of Anonymous did declare war on Sony, an attack such as what occurred on the PSN is not their normal method. Usually Anonymous in it's biggest escapades crashes servers using Denial of Service Attacks, in which case so much traffic is routed to the server, they cannot keep up and thus crash. Certainly not harmless, but mostly a small pain for whoever is the target.


First hand, Sony searched out Geohot to seek his possible involvement in the PSN Crack (CRACK, not HACK) with Geohot stating:

"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. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony."


Next of course, the finger was pointed at the Anonymous group, due to their prior declaration. Anonymous members responded:

"No matter who did it, this action is against the Anonymous principles, so it wasn't an Anonymous attack, it just was an attack to get private data. That's not Anonymous, that's just a crime to make money."

“We are concerned with the 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 the undertake in the name of corporations and public office.”


After the last bout with Sony, Anonymous members took to publicly demonstrating against Sony, which is where you will see photos of members in business suits walking around with Anon masks over their faces.

While it is possible, I find the newest developments in the PSN Crack highly questionable.


Sony has stated they found deep within their infrastructure a text file named "Anonymous" that when opened contained three words:

We Are Legion

I'm not discounting this, but without proof of the files existence, I find it to convenient for Sony to be able to scapegoat the "Fault" for the intrusion onto Anonymous, rather than allowing the focus to remain on them not having the proper security measures place.


I have also read reports that during the time of attack, members of Anonymous were performing a DoS attack on Sony, but supposedly during this someone (allegedly members themselves) performed the Crack that has forced Sony to shutdown the entire PSN.


While entirely possible that individuals other than the core members of the Anonymous group could be responsible, I just find the convenience of the aforementioned file being found to be a shady at best.

What are your thoughts?

17 comments:

  1. very interesting post. i think sony is gonna pay bigtime for their security mishap.

    imo they should have let people put linux on their consoles. there will always be those who will pirate games but most consumers for the most part will not.

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  2. The thing is, a majority of consumers do not have the drive and simply do not wish to go through the process of even learning HOW to pirate.

    I am just trying to enable everyone to keep an open-mind on issues such as these. Jumping to conclusions only leads to trouble

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  3. Trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls...

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  4. Anonymous are an unstoppable force.

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  5. Unstoppable force indeed, mike.

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  6. I think it was just messed up whoever did it because it's not cool stealing people's personal info in general

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  7. angsty 16 year olds in masks everywhere

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  8. Gotta love how all the anonymous is hiding, not showing who they are.

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  9. I am starting to think that it wasnt anon...

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  10. i love how anon gets blamed... for everything. I also remember when everyone on the internet was anon, where the rules stated, all men were men, all women were men and all children were FBI agents. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GOOD DAYS!?

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  11. Sony shouldn't be vulnerable to attacks in the first place...

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  12. I often daydream of knowing a single blasted thing about computers beyond reading my email...

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  13. @Jim, with a comment such as that, it is say to say you are NOT Anonymous, and have no idea what they stand for, even after (I'm assuming you performed this act) reading this post.

    @Beer for the shower, Youtube lol. It's the easiest answer to everything. well, next to google.

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  14. Well, they say that actions and reactions lead to development. I think it's a good thing that stuff has happened. Anon declares himself as a power, and, well, it is time for him to be recognized. Because Anonymous HAS the power. It's been proved in several occasion around the globe.

    Sony, as ANY major company tries to make profit on everything while nobody sees. But the internet community is like a watchful eye on everything, and the big companies have to understand that they cannot hide their small +profit technically illegal deeds just because it's their product.
    On the other hand it's a pain in the ass for the whole world when PSN is down.

    What is the position of Anon? it's a collaborative position which merges down of the opinions of a community members, so it is the most democratic.

    Sony's position is set to make profit. Not freedom and freesource distribution. Imagine that there was NEVER a situation someone has stood up against these companies. We would have something like Apple with their "doesn't work with anything but apple" everywhere. Would the IT world be better and as diversed as it is now? Will there be the possibility to do ANYTHING in ANY way? I guess not. All the industry would be aimed not for people's needs but for profit of a company.

    But people are creative and need the tools. We could have either two separated worlds of free-source and licensed stuff, first of which is a great tool for anything, but hard to understand, second is a high quality, but more limited, either we could have a collaboration between the two. I'd like the world to be that.

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  15. anonymous la' nhom ma toi rat ham mo ,la mot nhom tai nang ,hay co gang lam thanh con am anh cho toan the gioi

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