On Monday, April 4, the mysterious hacker collective that goes by the name Anonymous sent an ominous threat towards Sony for abusing "the judicial system in an attempt to censor information," and for victimizing its customers for merely "possession and sharing information."
The threat read: "Now you will experience the wretch of Anonymous. Expect us." It turns out they weren't playing. According to various reports, the group is responsible for today's shutdown of Sony's Playstation Network and of the Playstation.com website.
The threat came after Sony decided to take strict legal action against hacker George Hotz. Hotz, known online as Geohot, is best known for being the first to unlock Apple's iPhone. He wound up on Sony's radar after he "jailbroke" his Playstation 3 so it would run unauthorized games and software, and shared the instructions to do so.
The Playstation website, which seems to be back up and running, was down for the greater part of the day. Anonymous claimed it carried out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that brought down the site.
Sony would not comment as to whether the downtime was a result of the hack. When asked about the Playstation Network outage was quoted as saying, "We are currently investigating issues with Playstation Network, our engineers are working to retire and maintain the services."
[via The Inquirer]
