Sony’s websites are under fire today. The loose online collective known as Anonymous has turned its attention to the PlayStation maker, and a wave of distributed denial of service attacks has knocked PlayStation.com offline and slowed Sony.com to a crawl at various points on Monday.
The campaign, which Anonymous is calling Operation Sony or OpSony, is billed as retaliation for Sony’s lawsuits against console hackers. In a message sent to media outlets, the group named George Hotz, the hacker known as GeoHot who published the PS3’s root key earlier this year, along with a second hacker who goes by Graf_Chokolo. Anonymous accuses Sony of using the courts to suppress information about how its own products work and of trampling on the rights of people who bought its hardware. The statement includes a blunt warning, and according to NBC News, the group told Sony it would now experience “the wrath of Anonymous.”
PlayStation.com Drops Offline More Than Once
The disruption has not been constant. According to TechSpot’s report on the PlayStation.com outage, the site went down earlier in the day, briefly recovered, and then dropped again. Sony.com has also been sluggish or unreachable for stretches. Some reports, including one from SlashGear, say the PlayStation Network itself has been caught up in the attack, though Sony has not confirmed any impact on the service and the extent of any PSN problems is unclear.
If you have had trouble signing in or reaching the PlayStation Store today, this may be why. Sony has not issued a statement on the attacks.
Sony’s Hacker Lawsuits Fuel The Anger
The anger traces back to January, when Sony sued Hotz and members of the fail0verflow hacking group in federal court in San Francisco, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act among other claims. The court granted Sony a temporary restraining order against Hotz later that month. Then in early March, a federal magistrate judge allowed Sony to subpoena records including the IP addresses of visitors to Hotz’s website, a move that alarmed privacy advocates and plenty of PS3 owners who had simply been curious about the hack.
Anonymous is best known for its campaigns against the Church of Scientology and, late last year, against companies that cut ties with WikiLeaks. Its attacks generally work by flooding a target’s servers with more traffic than they can handle, which takes sites offline without actually breaking into them.
Not everyone in the PlayStation community is cheering. Many players simply want to download demos, browse the store or get online with friends, and an attack on Sony’s infrastructure lands on them as much as it does on the company. Hotz himself has not been linked to the attacks.
We will update as Sony’s sites come back and if the company responds.