AnonNews - Everything Anonymous

"Sony discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of Sony Online Entertainment’s servers named “Anonymous” with the words “We are Legion.”

Yeah, sure Sony, sure.

*COPY PASTE FROM OTHER POST*
I was on the sonyops IRC all damn day on the 19th 20th and 21st and not ONCE did i hear ONE THING about actually breaching there server
and if sony had a brain in there head they were logging that IRC
if anon did not collect as a hole to attack them it was not them
someone took advantage of the situation to attack them and blame it on us

if it was us we would if anything hold the info for ransom and not deny we did it to flex our mussles
hell we even said the PSN outage was not our doing in an official press release
i WANT sony to find this guy so I can have a wack at him my self

our goal was clear ... save the users from sony ... not attack them

This is such a scape goat , anon did not do this. I am not even part of Anon but I could tell anyone with almost 100% certainty that this was either an inside job, or done by a very smart collective group of people for financial gain. Just my 2 cents

Personally I think it was an inside job as credit cards most likely were encrypted (hopefully) and no major rumors are floating about obsurd amounts of fraud going on other than the Ars article which did not hold much weight.

Anonymous, we must draft a response to the House Committee on this. Screens, or any other kind of evidence needs to be put forward to show Sony is lying to the US Govt.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/playstationblog/5687533298/in/set-72157626521862165/

This alleged file is evidence of nothing but cannot be ignored.

ALL denial of involvement should be coupled with support for "Sonyfags" who have met a genuine loss of privacy. Remind them that you were the first to call for the current lawsuit against Sony. As hard as it is to admit, some within Anonymous who wished to purchase games for their PSN have had their identities stolen, too.

Actually the fraud is occurring, I had to cancel a card myself because someone was starting to rack up Skype charges(I used a seperate low limit card for PSN). The thing is, Sony in their infinite wisdom is saying no one's reporting it... but all their message boards and blogs require PSN authentication to post, so with PSN down, no one can report it.

It's cutting the phone lines for a town, lighting a house on fire, and saying there are no fires since no one called 911.

The problem with saying Anonymous is responsible is that Anonymous both cannot be held responsible and, in a way, must always be held responsible.

Anonymous is not an organized group. They're a bunch of people who generally troll 4chan and related sites and react to things in varied ways. They all tend to see themselves as a collective whole, but they really aren't. If a number of people who consider themselves to be a part of Anonymous decide to work together to bring something down, then we say that Anonymous was responsible for the attack, but the fact is, there may be just as many people who ALSO consider themselves to be Anonymous who disagree with what that other part of the group did.

The problem is, ANYBODY can say they're a part of Anonymous and there's really no way to know if it's true or not. That's kind of the whole point. We don't know how many people are in Anonymous or if the people who do these sorts of attacks and claim to be a part of Anonymous ever actually interact with other people who claim to be a part of Anonymous. They have no way to build consensus or elect leaders and they generally reject this idea. They are just a mass of people who follow an ideal. That's partially what makes them so threatening.

So on the one hand, yes, the people who did this probably consider themselves to be a part of Anonymous, and so you could say that Anonymous was responsible, but on the other hand, this doesn't really feel like a typical Anonymous takedown. If the bulk of Anonymous were behind this attack, there wouldn't be any doubt in our minds of whether or not they were.

Take the recent Gawker attack as an example. When that attack occurred, Anonymous was buzzing about it and all of the stolen information was released for public consumption. In this case, while Sony says that the information has been compromised, if that much info was truly stolen by Anonymous, they probably would have done something similar, either with coordinated attacks or a mass dissemination of information. As far as I know, this hasn't happened yet. So, to me, this either seems like a small group of Anonymous "members" who found a security exploit, took advantage of it, maybe stole a bit of information for their own personal use, and then left a note as a sort of jab at them, or an attack by a different group that used the Anonymous slogan as a way of deflecting the blame.

"Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack."

Nope, definitely not Anonymous.

The Sony hackers who perpetrated one of the biggest data breaches in history left a calling card on Sony's servers: a file called "Anonymous," containing the notorious hacking group's tag line. This is bad news for Anonymous, whose members largely want nothing to do with the hack.

Last month, hackers exposed the personal information, including credit card data, of millions of gamers by breaching Sony's PlayStation Network. In a letter sent to Congress today, Sony explained that the company had been the target of a "very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information."

The letter also implicitly blamed Anonymous: Sony revealed it discovered a file on Sony Online Entertainment servers called "Anonymous" with the group's tagline, "We Are Legion." Case closed, right?

Not really: Most Anonymous members claim the group had nothing to do with this hack and have taken extraordinary steps to distance themselves from it. On the IRC servers Anonymous uses to organize its operations, channels dedicated to attacks on Sony have been systematically deleted for weeks. Even mentioning an operation against Sony can lead to a ban. And when Sony's PlayStation Network went down mysteriously last month—we now know this was when the hack was occurring—Anonymous took the unusual step of issuing a press release claiming that "for once we didn't do it."

Anonymous has come to realize that attacking Sony's PlayStation Network alienates a powerful group of potential supporters: nerds. The point was proved after Anonymous launched an unrelated attack on Sony in early April that briefly took down the PlayStation Network, in retaliation for Sony suing a kid who bypassed the Playstation 3's security systems. The attack sparked a nerd backlash which crippled Anonymous chat servers with retaliatory strikes and was generally a PR disaster.

"All the Sony kids were flooding the [Anonymous chat servers] and whining and complaining," said Gregg Housh an activist associated with Anonymous. An attack on Sony's PlayStation Network "pisses off a lot of people they want as fans not enemies." A similar concern was voiced last December when Anonymous contemplated attacking Amazon in revenge for it banning Wikileaks: One reason for not attacking was concern that the attack might anger people who were trying to do holiday shopping.

The dilemma presented by this new Sony hack shows how Anonymous' greatest asset—its amorphous, grassroots nature—can also be its greatest weakness. As news spreads that Anonymous was behind an attack on millions of gamers, there will likely be another backlash. "Pissed off that Anonymous Hacked PSN," wrote one Twitter user. Stealing millions of regular folks' credit cards is not a good look for Anonymous, the self-styled defenders of free speech.

Cries of "scapegoat" have been filling the Anonyosphere, which will no doubt argue Sony is trying to unload responsibility for its enormous screwup on Anonymous. But frankly there's almost no way Anonymous can disavow a role, especially given their past attacks on Sony: If someone claims to be Anonymous, they are Anonymous. Just as the small cadre of elite hackers who took down the security firm HBGary were Anonymous, whoever was behind the PlayStation hack can claim the Anonymous banner as well—whether "Anonymous" claims them or not.