Anonymous Attacking Itself, Sony Regaining Strength

Anonymous has made it clear that they have targeted Sony and will continue to do so. They have taken down their websites and, if rumors are to be believed, even caused the shut down of the PSN and SOE.

While these actions have garnered the hatred of Playstation owners worldwide, it seems that some who are part of Anonymous’ “unofficial” ranks have turned on the group as well. This was posted on a hacking site today:

We regret to inform you today that our network has been compromised by a former IRC-operator and fellow helper named “Ryan”. He decided that he didn’t like the leaderless command structure that AnonOps Network Admins use. So he organised a coup d’etat, with his “friends” at skidsr.us . Using the networks service bot “Zalgo” he scavenged the IP’s and passwords of all the network servers (including the hub) and then systematically aimed denial of service attacks at them.

The problem here is that since Anonymous is a collection of a bunch of, well, anonymous people no one is higher than the next person in terms of status. So while they are willing to collaborate at times to organize and conduct their attacks, it only takes one person to decide he/she doesn’t agree with the group since said group is leaderless. That happened here and it led to Anonymous being the victims of their own methods.

We are profoundly sorry for this drama, and we can’t give you a an estimate on when service will resume normally,’ said Sony Anonymous.

This internal drama has come at a good time for Sony as they seem to be rebuilding their security to prevent further access from the group. It was revealed earlier in the week that Anonymous was planning an attack on an unspecified company website this weekend in hopes of posting any obtained information on the web for everyone to see. However, it looks like Sony caught wind of this information and acted accordingly to secure their supposedly vulnerable servers.

One of the IRC channels the hackers were using to communicate contained this entry:

Apparently Sony saw that article because the last server that I could access is offline now…its probbaly (sic) being patched like the other servers. There goes our window

These victories, whether seen as large or small, are steps in the right direction for Sony to reclaim its previous status. Anonymous claim to never forgive or forget which means another attack is inevitable, but hopefully Sony’s improvements will better prepare them to take the group head on next time