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?