Sony: Anonymous Didn’t Hack Us, But Made It Easy

After initially going on the record stating that Anonymous, the evangelist hacker group, had no involvement in the actual hack of the PlayStation Network (and by extension the SOE network), Sony have now pointed the finger for a different reason.

In a letter to congress, Sony has posited that the very disruptive flooding/attacks on Sony servers in retaliation for the George Hotz lawsuit was a sufficient distraction to leave a much larger window for hackers to enter Sony systems and leave undetected. Sony has suggested that had the coordinated denial-of-service attacks not happened, a compromise of their servers would have been more easily detected and possibly thwarted.

From BBCNews:

Sony has blamed the online vigilante group Anonymous for indirectly allowing the security breach that allowed a hacker to gain access to the personal data of more than 100m online gamers.

In a letter to the US Congress, Sony said the breach came at the same time as it was fighting a denial-of-service attack from Anonymous.

Denial-of-service attacks take servers down by overwhelming them with traffic.

The online vigilante group has denied being involved in the data theft.

Sony said that it had been the target of attacks from Anonymous because it had taken action against a hacker in a federal court in San Francisco.

In the letter to members of the House Commerce Committee, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America, defended the way that his company had dealt with the breach.

Sony discovered a breach in its Playstation video game network on 20 April but did not report it to US authorities for two days and only informed consumers on 26 April.

“Throughout the process, Sony Network Entertainment America was very concerned that announcing partial or tentative information to consumers could cause confusion and lead them to take unnecessary actions if the information was not fully corroborated by forensic evidence,” the letter said.