LulzSec, also known as Lulz Security, which has become infamous for their past and more recent hacks including PBS and Sony, has hacked Sony HQ…again. This time they scored around 54 megabytes of the developer’s source code to the PlayStation Network. What does it mean? Hold on to your butts. The group published a press release detailing the hack while simultaneously releasing all stolen code to the public through various channels. The implications of this are enormous, as Sony’s PSN is now wide-open to any exploits found in the previously obfuscated code. Expect Sony’s problems to continue for a while.
The targeting of Sony stems from their legal assault on George Hotz, otherwise known as GeoHotz, who had found and published a way to circumvent protection mechanisms on the PlayStation 3. This was a big deal after the company removed the “Other OS” feature through a firmware update that allowed the installation of Linux on the console to use the powerful IBM Cell processor that powers the machine. The PS3 has been known to be used by organizations like the US Air Force in supercomputer clusters due to the Cell processor’s vastly superior floating-point performance which is highly desired for processing large amounts of data for modeling.
Stay tuned…
IBM has claimed that it has made a breakthrough in data security that could potentially usher in a new era of manipulation of sensitive encrypted data without revealing what the data actually is. The idea isn’t new, Ronald Rivest (the R in RSA) thought it up thirty years ago; thinking it to be too infeasible to ever implement. The future implications on data security are very promising to say the least.
