Self titled ‘Hacktivist’ group Anonymous have been giving Sony trouble all week since they announced that they plan to dish out their own flavour of ‘justice’ in regards to the PS3 court case involving Geohot and Graf Chokolo (who famously cracked several devices). With Sony owned sites like the US Playstation blog, the PC based PS Store, and so on, crashing shortly after the menacing post on the hacking team’s site was published, and intermittent sign out errors on the PSN server, Sony have up to this point been reassuring gamers that PSN is simply undergoing a small maintenance period and ignoring the sudden problems with their websites.
The official statements from Sony read to the effect of ‘we’re working hard to fix the problems, thank you for your patience’. Today Sony has for the first time admitted the issues could be due to a third party which basically means ‘Anonymous’. It appears that Anonymous are teasing Sony at the moment, with what they termed “mere pokes and prods”, telling Sony the worst is yet to come and warned the company that “they are coming.”
Talking to IGN, Sony confessed: “We are currently investigating, including the possibility of targeted behaviours of an outside party. Our engineers are working to restore and maintain the services”. So it seems the cyber battle is officially underway?
However Sony might be in for a short breather as Anonymous has “temporarily” halted its attacks on the Playstation Network, apologising and stating that they did not intend to affect the gamers. On their website Anonymous have posted the following:
“Anonymous is not attacking the PSN at this time. Sony’s official position is that the PSN is undergoing maintenance. We realise that targeting the PSN is not a good idea. We have therefore temporarily suspended our action, until a method is found that will not severely impact Sony customers. We are not aiming to attack customers of Sony. This attack is aimed solely at Sony, and we will try our best to not affect the gamers, as this would defeat the purpose of our actions. If we did inconvenience users, please know that this was not our goal.”
I personally am slightly concerned about the implications of the word ‘temporarily’, as they continue to say that their campaign will continue until they are “satisfied with the outcome”. How long this electronic fight will last is anybody’s guess, but the worrying thing is how easily the group seemed to shake up some sectors in Sony. The sub-group ‘SonyRecon’ has revealed plans to attack specific Sony employees directly. This targeted behaviour could lead to some rocky weeks ahead for PS3 owners. We’ll keep you updated as things develop but until then all we can do is stand back and watch in silence. Share your thoughts below.
