Friday 3 June 2011

A Series of Sony Websites Hacked


Sony recently announced that the restoration of the PlayStation Network would be complete by the end of this week; however, the multinational corporation has been victimized yet again with a number of their websites including Sony Pictures, Sony Music Belgium, and Sony Music Netherlands being hacked. Hacker group Lulzsec has claimed responsibility for stealing information of around 100,000 users’ personal information that includes passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, as well as Sony optional information that is related to their Sony accounts.

Lulzsec has set sail for Sont to fail!
Lulzsec has set sail for Sony to fail!


The group has been promising attacks on Sony since a week claiming “the beginning of the end for Sony.” According to Lulzsec’s post on Pastebin, in addition to the stolen user data, the group is also in possession of admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 'music codes' and 3.5 million 'music coupons.’ Lulzsec said that they did not have the resources to copy all the information but are posting samples to prove the information gathered is genuine. More information could have been gathered but it would take several more weeks to be acquired.

The hacker group said that gaining access to the network wasn’t a difficult task and all it required was a single SQL injection. What was worse was that every bit of data they took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just a matter of taking it. Criticizing Sony’s security measures the hacker group said that this was disgraceful and insecure and Sony was asking for it. Lulzsec posted on their Twitter page that they would accept contributions in the form of BitCoin virtual currency that will be used to help it do more hacking.

This comes as major blow to the company that has announced the restoration of its PSN services

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