ANONYMOUS DENIES HAVING ANYTHING TO DO WITH SONY HACKING

Hacktivism group Anonymous, which routinely attacks major corporations and takes up political causes, said it is not responsible for the theft of sensitive information and credit card data from Sony’s Playstation Network (PSN) online gaming network in an announcement today.

Sony laid indirect blame for the intrusion and PSN outage on Anonymous yesterday, saying that its defenses were down while it fended off a denial of service attack — which left the doors open for the hackers to come in and steal sensitive information. Anonymous took on Sony after the company went after hacker George Hotz, who reverse engineered the PlayStation 3 to run unauthorized programs.

“If a legitimate and honest investigation into credit card theft is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable,” the group stated in a press release.

In a letter to Congress earlier today, Sony said that it found a file labeled “anonymous” with a fragment of the hacktivism group’s slogan — “we are legion.” That prompted the company to label Anonymous at least partially responsible for an attack that brought down its online gaming network and resulted in hackers stealing sensitive information about 100 million PSN and Station.com users.

“While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our ‘leadership’ does not condone credit card theft,” the group stated in a press release. “We are concerned with the erosion of privacy and fair use, the spread of corporate feudalism, the abuse of power and the justifications of executives and leaders who believe themselves immune personally and financially for the actions the undertake in the name of corporations and public office.”