Anonymous says it hacked 10M PSN accounts; Sony disagrees
Anonymous claims to have struck again as far as the Sony PlayStation Network is concerned, but the whole matter appears to be a hoax.
A tweet posted on Wednesday to the Twitter account of the infamous international hacker group asserted that the PlayStation Network had been hacked again. The tweet has been taken down, but here is a screenshot before it was removed just minutes ago:
Kotaku also linked to a tweet that reportedly read 10 million PSN accounts were at risk, but that tweet has since been deleted.
However, it's possible that these tweets were deleted because the claims were unsubstantiated.
Shane Bettenhausen, who works in Sony's business development unit retaliated on his on Twitter account, retorted by arguing that the claims were false. Bettenhausen's tweet has also been deleted, but here's a screenshot:
However, note that there hasn't been an official statement from the Sony Corporation itself yet.
There has been bad blood -- to say the least -- between Sony and Anonymous for more than a year now.
Last spring, Sony's PlayStation Network was hacked, putting millions of accounts with sensitive and personal data worldwide at risk. Sony took a lot of flack for not coming forth with answers for its customers sooner, and many members signed off from the Network for good -- some of whom went so far as to sell their PlayStation 3 consoles altogether.
However, a few weeks after the security breach, Sony revealed that it found a file tied to Anonymous on Sony Online Entertainment servers. It eventually broke out into an international war between Anonymous and Sony, including one incident in Spain in which three people were arrested for allegedly being involved in the PSN security breach. Anonymous retaliated by hacking the official website of Spain's national police force.
By that point, the damage had been pretty much done between this debacle and the earthquake in Japan last March as Sony faced a $3.2 billion loss for the 2010-2011 fiscal year.
via Kotaku