George “GeoHot” Hotz denies any involvement in attack on network, says it resulted from corporate hubris regarding hackers.
Not long before the PlayStation Network was hit by a disastrous “external intrusion” last week, it had been the subject of another attack. That assault was staged in early April by the hacker collective known as Anonymous in retaliation for Sony suing George “GeoHot” Hotz, the admitted PlayStation 3 hacker who helped crack the console’s security system late last year.
Shortly after the most recent attack, which has brought down the PSN for over a week, Anonymous denied sanctioning any further action against Sony. However, the decentralized nature of the hacker collective could mean some rogue elements may be behind the data leak that has paralyzed the service–and has led to the potential leak of some 77 million PSN users’ personal data.
For his part, Hotz, who settled his suit with Sony earlier this month, denies any part in the PSN outage. “To anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I’m not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door,” he said in a post on his personal blog. He also condemned the attack, saying “Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool; hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony.”
But just because Hotz claims not to be involved in the PSN breach doesn’t mean he isn’t sounding off on the matter. “Let’s not fault the Sony engineers for this; the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the
BMG root kit,” he said. “The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea.”
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