About a month ago, Sony online services was struck a rather large blow. Someone had hacked into the network, completely shut it down, and stole a multitude of customer information. However, the "stolen information" part wasn't revealed until a week later. Needless to say, there was an outcry from the community. Things got worse, as Sony was faced with lawsuits and subpoenas afterwards. Then, a couple weeks later, Sony Online Entertainment was hacked, with more customer information stolen, as well as potential credit card theft (although this time, Sony was kind enough to worn people right away). Today, the Playstation Network was relaunched with limited capabilities, with services to be fully relaunched by the end of the month.
Who caused the damage has been somewhat mysterious. As far as Sony could figure, it was caused by the publicly unknown (and aptly named) group Anonymous. Why them? Two reasons supported their argument. First, someone had actually left a logo as a taunt on the wrecked servers. Although the group as a whole has denied their involvement, they did not deny that there were a couple people who didn't get a memo to lay off the attacks, which leads to the second piece of "evidence." After Sony had started a lawsuit with a system modder (someone who makes alterations to either the programming or physical state of a console) known as "Geohotz" for creating alterations to allow homebrewing (another terms for using downloaded titles on the system) on their systems, Anonymous had initiated an attack as retribution, feeling that they were unfairly targeting him. The basis of Sony's actions was due to the idea of promoting piracy, which Geohotz never did. He advocated such modding for personal use, not to cause damage to Sony's company. The only reason Anonymous decided to call a truce was because they did not want to affect the community and the users.
In the end, I can't help but feel Sony shot themselves in the foot over this. Sony staunchly opposes piracy and punishes anyone they can who tries it. However, in some strange sense of irony, they never really took any preventative measure against truly defending it, relying simply on the technology at hand. Blu-rays, because of their unique format and date encryption, are naturally difficult to pirate (which is probably one of the reasons Sony advocated this format and used it for there Playstation 3s). For their networks, they used internal means to "encode" their data based on the programs that were naturally used to run the servers. However, they never really go as far to make things more difficult for people to pirate objects. In the end, they are about reaction, rather than preventative action.
While it's certainly a problem that they are suffering this hack with drastic effects on everyone (digital distribution has been halted for various companies as well as denying users content that they pay for), one has to wonder if Sony didn't have this coming? What if they had done more to stop such things from happening? If they focused on the long run rather than just deal with the problems as they come, would there have been potential to stop the network hacks? While there is still the possibility of someone still getting in, there would still be less blame to put on Sony's shoulders had they followed this route.
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