Sony Implicates Anonymous to Congress in SOE Outage

Despite declining to appear in front of the US Congress in order to present its case regarding the PSN outage and consequent loss of user data, Sony presented the body with a letter in which it appears to lay blame at the Anonymous Hacktivist group.

The letter (PDF here) explains what Sony has done and will do with PSN but it also states:

"When Sony Online Entertainment discovered this past Sunday afternoon that data from its servers had been stolen, it also discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of those servers named 'Anonymous' with the words 'We are Legion'.

"Just weeks before, several Sony companies had been the target of large-scale, coordinated denial of service attacks by the group called Anonymous."

So, a SOE server was compromised, possibly, but Anonymous. This still doesn't explain PSN.

The letter continues, "Almost two weeks ago, one or more cyber criminals gained access to PlayStation Network servers at or around the same time that these servers were experiencing denial of service attacks. The Sony Network Entertainment team did not immediately detect the criminal intrusion for several possible reasons.

"First, detection was difficult because of the sheer sophistication of the intrusion.

"Second, detection was difficult because the criminal hackers exploited a system software vulnerability.

"Finally, our security teams were working very hard to defend against denial of service attacks, and that may have made it more difficult to detect this intrusion quickly - all perhaps by design."

It then speculates in dramatic style, the kind you might find in a half-decent movie or first-party game, "Whether those who participated in the denial of service attacks were conspirators or whether they were simply duped into providing cover for a very clever thief, we may never know."

So, thus far, we seem to have a mix of cock-up and conspiracy.