Sony appears to be clawing its way back. After a day of denial of service attacks from the online collective Anonymous, Sony.com is loading again, and the company looks to be working through the rest of its web properties as traffic settles.
PlayStation.com Is Still Flickering
The recovery is not complete yet. PlayStation.com, which took the brunt of the assault, has been flickering between up and down for much of the day. TechSpot reported that the site went offline, returned for a while, and then fell over again, and SlashGear’s rundown of the attack suggested PlayStation.com was in the process of coming back as Sony.com stabilized. If you are still getting errors, give it a little time.
Sony has not commented publicly on the attacks or on what it did to get its sites running again, so the cause of the recovery is not clear. Attacks of this kind tend to rise and fall with the number of people taking part, and sites often return once the flood of traffic eases or a company reroutes it.
Anonymous Targets Sony Over The Hotz Case
The attacks are part of what Anonymous calls Operation Sony, and the group has been clear about its motive. It objects to Sony’s legal campaign against PS3 hackers, specifically naming George Hotz and Graf_Chokolo, and it accuses the company of abusing the courts to keep people from learning how their own hardware works. A denial of service attack does not involve breaking into anything. It simply overwhelms servers with junk requests until legitimate visitors cannot get through, which is why the damage tends to be temporary.
Sony’s case against Hotz is still in front of a federal court in California. The company sued him and members of the fail0verflow group in January over the PS3 jailbreak, and in March a magistrate judge signed off on subpoenas covering visitors to Hotz’s website and several of his online accounts. That order, in particular, struck a nerve online, and it was one of the grievances cited as Anonymous began organizing against Sony.
Store Protests Planned For April 16
Anonymous has said this is just the opening move. Beyond the website attacks, the group has called on supporters to show up at Sony retail stores on April 16 for real world protests. Whether that gains much traction remains to be seen. Reaction among PlayStation owners has been mixed at best, with many pointing out that the people most inconvenienced by downed sites and a shaky online service are ordinary players, not Sony’s legal team.
For players, the practical effect has been an annoyance rather than a catastrophe. Anyone who relies on PlayStation.com for news, support pages or account management may simply find it slow or patchy for a while longer as Sony works through the backlog.
We will keep watching to see whether Anonymous follows through on its threats, and whether Sony has anything to say about the attacks. For now, the main Sony site is back, and the rest look to be following.