Anonymous Sets Their Sights On Sony

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Anonymous, the “hacktivist group” which grew to prominence for their war against the Church of Scientology, and more recently, companies who refused to do business with WikiLeaks, has a new corporate target. They’ve promised that Japanese electronics giant Sony will “[receive] the undivided attention of Anonymous.” The group is targeting Sony for the company’s legal actions against GeoHot and graf_chokolo – two modders/hackers who were active in “jailbreaking” the PS3.

And, we may have already seen the first Anonymous strike against Sony. Today, several official PlayStation websites went offline, and people reportedly had trouble signing into the PlayStation Network. Sony, of course, didn’t cite any reasons for the outages, just saying that the services were down for “sporadic maintenance.” According to tech blog Engadget, Anonymous took credit for the outages.

Sony has been engaged in lawsuits against George “GeoHot” Hotz and graf_chokolo, the aforementioned modders who were active in gaining hypervisor access to the PlayStation 3 and “jailbreaking” it. In their letter to Sony, Anonymous lists that Sony has “violated the privacy of thousands.” This seems to be a reference to a recent subpoena granted to Sony’s legal team that gave them the IP addresses of everybody who visited Geohot’s website. In addition, Sony has also gained access to information from YouTube, Google and Twitter related to Geohot’s accounts and user data.

The ongoing legal case seems to still be in the discovery phase. Sony is upset that Geohot (allegedly) deliberated damaged subpoenaed hard drives before surrendering them to the court. Then, Sony alleged that Geohot was hiding in South America to delay the legal discovery process even more. Geohot came back saying that he was just on vacation, not hiding from the legal process.