Topic: Anonymous Threatens Sony With Robotic Voice On YouTube

[Chozo Ghost]

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/12/29/anonymous-threatens-sony-with-robotic-voice-on-youtube.aspx

Sony might have forgotten all about these guys, but apparently these guys haven't forgotten about Sony.

[Lithium]

Yeah anonymous really did a great job at turning public opinion against them after the PSN hacking incident, and this video does a great job at making them sound full of themselves too.

anonymous is trying real hard to be a real life version of Laughing man but man do they suck at it.

[broodwars]

If Anonymous really does intend to actually do anything this time (unlike when they threatened Fox News and then chickened out), I don't understand why Sony again.  Sony is hardly the only company that's been supporting SOPA, and frankly PS3 owners have had enough trouble in the last year because of them.  But I suppose such simple reasoning is beyond Anonymous.

[Morari]

Sony deserves whatever they get. They have a looong history of abusing their own customers. It's a real wonder anyone still buys their products. I suppose ignorance is bliss.

[broodwars]

Sony deserves whatever they get. They have a looong history of abusing their own customers. It's a real wonder anyone still buys their products. I suppose ignorance is bliss.

Here's the thing, though: the last time that Anonymous went after Sony, it was the innocent Sony customers who suffered.  In the best case scenario, we had to put up with the lack of online play and the inability to download our previously purchased software (let alone buy new software) for the better part of a month.  Then we had to go change all our passwords and credit card information.  Some were much less fortunate.  And before you argue that "well, we don't know that that was Anonymous", we don't know that it wasn't either.  And even if they weren't directly responsible, their actions still weakened what security there was and diverted attention so the actual hackers could do their damage.  So the way I see it, they are at best indirectly responsible for the PSN outage and subsequent data theft.  Our heroes, ladies and gentlemen!

Also, although it looked early on like that Sony would take a major hit from all that, they weathered the storm pretty well and PSN sales were actually up in the months following their Welcome Back program.  So it was pretty much the users who were mainly hurt by Anonymous' last little illegal temper tantrum, and it'll be the users once again who are the most affected by a second one.  Of course, as Anonymous has already been on record stating: we are just collateral damage.  They have a good cause this time (SOPA is a horrible piece of legislation), but I think as usual they are going to go about this the completely wrong way.

[Killer_Man_Jaro]

Also, although it looked early on like that Sony would take a major hit from all that, they weathered the storm pretty well and PSN sales were actually up in the months following their Welcome Back program.  So it was pretty much the users who were mainly hurt by Anonymous' last little illegal temper tantrum, and it'll be the users once again who are the most affected by a second one.

Let's be realistic here. Users couldn't use their online services for quite a while and that sucks, but they were hardly 'mainly hurt' or the 'most affected.' Sony lost $170 million+ on outage expenses and experienced an absolutely massive valley in their stock prices. Even for a big corporation, that's nothing to sneeze at and takes precedence over players being annoyed that they were limited to offline activities.

Anyway, that's not the real issue. If Sony were smart, they wouldn't tempt fate and would just back out. If you recall, in the months following the PSN outage, there was a spate of reports from several big publishers stating that their websites and such had been compromised. I even got an email from Steam Support not long ago telling me to change my security information, just in case the recent Steam breach had gotten anything. Since then, everyone's been quietly dropping their support of SOPA, with today's main story being that Nintendo is the latest to back out.

Hopefully, if the worst comes to the worst, the weeks they spent rebuilding PSN will pay off and stop such an epic cock-up from happening again. But it really shouldn't come to that, unless they are too stubborn to change course, which is likely.

[Shorty McNostril]

Weren't these guys going to take down facebook in November?

[S-U-P-E-R]

stuff

Anonymous usually tries to take credit for the things they actually do. Also, if they didn't, how did they "weaken" PSN security?

Weren't these guys going to take down facebook in November?

I too am wondering what happened to that. Did they just lose interest?

[TJ Spyke]

Anonymous are a bunch of cowards and criminals, anybody who supports them is a fool.

Anonymous said they were not the ones threatening to take down Facebook, it was someone saying they were part of it.

[Chozo Ghost]

PSN sales were actually up in the months following their Welcome Back program.

On the surface that might seem like a positive thing, but maybe it was actually just the backlog of existing customers which had built up over the course of the two months PSN was down and then when it went back up that backlog got redeemed all at once and that inflated the sales? Could that be a possibility? Perhaps Sony also included those free welcome back games in their sales figures deliberately in order to inflate things further to make them look good to investors.

Also, I thought LulzSec and not Anonymous were the ones behind the attack?

[TJ Spyke]

Lulzsec's first attacks were in May 2011 (going after Fox). The PSN attack was in April.

[BranDonk Kong]

SONY deserves it.

[TJ Spyke]

For what? Removing an optional feature that less than 1% of PS3 owners even used? Plus, Anonymous hurt the millions of PS3 owners, anybody who owns a PS3 should be pissed at Anonymous and want them taken down.

[Chozo Ghost]

Whoever hacked PSN did PS3 owners a favor, because it forced Sony to ramp up security when otherwise they didn't even give a ****, and despite all the hype of credit card numbers being stolen, to this date there has never been any confirmed report of fraud being committed in connection with that hacking. Whoever hacked PSN wasn't interested in stealing credit card numbers apparently, but by doing what they did they forced Sony to get off their ass and make it harder for someone in the future to steal that information. So it seems like it ended up being a good thing. Its kinda like a white hacking where the vulnerabilities are exposed and then patched up before black hackers can capitalize on that. They embarrassed Sony and cost them a lot of money so what they did didn't benefit Sony at all in any way, but it did benefit the consumers because consumers got more security for their information as a result.

Plus there was the free stuff from the welcome back program, so that's another reason PS3 owners should be thankful for the hacking.

[broodwars]

Anonymous usually tries to take credit for the things they actually do. Also, if they didn't, how did they "weaken" PSN security?

Personally, I'm rather suspicious of the whole "take credit" aspect of terrorism.  It's not out the realm of possibility (and probably not uncommon in the real world) for a group to take responsibility for an act they didn't commit to obtain attention and notoriety.  By the same token, it would make sense for a group that did perpetrate such an act to not take credit if they wished to remain under the radar or underestimated. 

Anonymous probably gets away with quite a lot by virtue of a public persona that seems relatively harmless as cyber terrorists go: while they have been known to hack databases for information (as was the case with their recent campaign against the mexican drug cartels IIRC), their main MO is DDOS attacks.  DDOS attacks can be annoying and taxing to deal with on both the part of customers and companies, but at the end of the day the damage is "relatively" minimal and short-lived.  That reputation could be a rather convenient shield against major retaliation from law enforcement, should the group have much more insidious factions that commit much more damaging attacks (like stealing personal information off PSN, for example).  That's all hypothetically-speaking, of course, since we still don't know the identities of the PSN Thieves.

As for "weakening PSN security", the major hacks that stole the PSN information came while Sony was busy trying to stave off Anonymous' DDOS attacks.  The people whose jobs were to watch these systems for exterior intrusion were busy dealing with those clowns.  Hopefully, with Sony's restructuring and re-fortification of their security network, they'll be in much better shape to handle another similar situation in the future.

Anonymous are a bunch of cowards and criminals

You can add "traitors" to that description as well, assuming Anonymous wasn't lying in that recent video where they claimed they hacked the U.S. Department of Defense.  It's funny, but as much as I dislike the Occupy Wall Street folks for their short-sightedness and how many don't really seem to understand what they stand for, I will give them this: they have the courage to actually protest without masks in person, some even with some respect for the Rule of Law and public decorum.  I can respect that, even if I don't agree with their movement.

Anonymous, though, hides behind anonymity and Guy Fawkes masks on those rare occasions where they congregate in real life.  Unlike the Occupiers who accept that there could be negative consequences to their actions, Anonymous doesn't have the strength of their convictions to fight for the causes they believe in as real people with identities and something to lose.  They'd rather hide behind Anonymity and DDOS programs, which to me undermines their legitimacy as "agents of justice".

By contrast, recently a large number of the critics and writers of Channel Awesome (host of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com) actually traveled to Washington and successfully lobbied several Congressmen (through their staffers) against SOPA and Protect IP.  Now there's dedication, a true display of the faith of one's convictions and working legally within the system to try to affect positive change.  By comparison, Anonymous' actions are laughable and petty, and they'll probably affect End Users more than they will the actual companies pushing for this Bill.

[Chozo Ghost]

Let's not forget Sony fired a bunch of people just before the attack occurred, people who had they not been fired may have been able to mitigate the damage or even prevent it entirely, but we will never know because Sony acted like an asshole and fired them.

I don't think its out of the realm of possibility that some of these fired individuals might have been responsible. Not only would they have the motive for it because of the loss of their job, but they would also be the ones most capable of doing it because they would have inside knowledge.

But regardless of who actually did it (and we may never know who that was), the fact is security for customer information started to get a higher priority from Sony because of that, and I think that's something that is definite win for PS3 owners. Before the attacks Sony gave a very low priority to protecting customer information and privacy. Sony deserves to be scolded for that.

[S-U-P-E-R]

I'm still salty about the Lik-Sang thing and I would be okay with anonymous blowing Sony up. And yes, I'm a PS3 owner.

[Chozo Ghost]

I'm still salty about the Lik-Sang thing

Sony is also directly responsible for killing off Bleemcast, and indirectly they had a lot to do with the death of Sega too.



Murdered at the hands of Sony.

[TJ Spyke]

I think Sega would have bowed out of the console wars eventually anyways, they were in debt before the PS1 even launched. Sony may have helped speed it up though since people that might have bought the Saturn bought a PS1 instead.

[Luigi Dude]

Sega killed themselves because of how horribly managed the company was.  When you have the Japanese side intentionally sabotaging the Saturn in North America, even though North America was Sega's largest market, you know these people had no idea how to run a successful business.

[BranDonk Kong]

Back on track - PSN getting hacked was not any kind of retaliation for SONY removing OtherOS, and if it was supposed to be (which it wasn't), it was roughly a year too late (almost two years if you factor in that they first removed it when the "Slim" console was released) You're mixing up jailbreaking the PS3, OtherOS being removed, and the PSN outage - which was directly caused by SONY's complete lack of security for protecting their consumers' accounts.

Should people be mad that their information was compromised - no doubt, but they should place the blame squarely where it belongs - on SONY. And who is to say that small-scale hackers have not been stealing our information from PSN since its inception? PSN didn't get hacked because SONY unplugged the security machine or something, it got hacked because the security was basically non-existent (I know there is no "security machine", just making a point).

[TJ Spyke]

Saying Sony is responsible is liking saying a murder victim is at fault rather than the killer. Anonymous (or whoever hacked PSN, though most likely it was them) are 100% to blame and only them.

[Chozo Ghost]

Saying Sony is responsible is liking saying a murder victim is at fault rather than the killer. Anonymous (or whoever hacked PSN, though most likely it was them) are 100% to blame and only them.

Sony is responsible because they are the operators of PSN and responsible for its security. They didn't put much effort into protecting consumer information so yes they are responsible. That's the way the law works and that's why there are class action lawsuits against them because of it.

Its like if you went to some place of business and lets say there was ice on the sidewalk and you slip and get injured on it. Technically the ice is the cause of your injury right? But it was the responsibility of that business to salt that ice or take whatever other measures necessary, so you have the right to sue them because they are responsible for your injury.

[broodwars]

Its like if you went to some place of business and lets say there was ice on the sidewalk and you slip and get injured on it. Technically the ice is the cause of your injury right? But it was the responsibility of that business to salt that ice or take whatever other measures necessary, so you have the right to sue them because they are responsible for your injury.

That is a bad analogy, as the ice does not have sentience for which it can be judged.  By contrast, a low-life scum identity thieves (like those that hacked PSN) do have agency in their own existence.  By Law, Sony does have actions to account for with their customers since they did not take their security seriously enough before the PSN outage, which is being dealt with in the legal system right now.  But the folks directly responsible for the PSN hack were the hackers themselves.  That's the law.

This is more like a woman having insufficient security on her home, and then blaming her if criminals break into her house and rape her.  Well of course the rape is directly her fault!  If only she had paid for sufficient security to prevent such things!  What nonsense.   

[UncleBob]

Saying Sony is responsible is liking saying a murder victim is at fault rather than the killer.

SONY was not the victim of the hack.  The consumers were.

Let's take your analogy.  I'm staying in a hotel.  As such, I expect the hotel to provide basic protection - say, doors that lock and keep people out.  Now, let's say this hotel went cheap and they have locks that look like they use a magnetic strip card (like a credit card) but, instead, really just have a trigger that gets hit when you stick any old card into the slot (like a playing card).  Knowing this, someone comes into the hotel, "breaks" into my room and kills me.

You're calling the hotel the victim, when they're the ones who went cheap on the security, knew the flaws where there and did nothing to prevent it or warn me - in fact, misled me into believing I was safe.

Does the hotel get some bad press over the event?  Do they lose some money when people stop staying there - or, even, when they have to be closed down for a month to clean the room and have their "security" upgraded?  Sure.  But *I* am the victim.

Saying the hotel is responsible for their bad decisions that allowed the chain of events to happen is merely common sense.