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…
While on the surface, this may not seem to be about security, but that’s exactly what it’s about. The Time.com poll for the world’s most influential person is legitimate. The interesting part is that the poll was hacked to allow him to win. This may be seen as a prank by some nerdy kids with too much time and some decent knowledge on their hands to make a name for themselves, that’s exactly what it is and isn’t.
You may not know moot is, but you are probably aware of some of the antics and feats of his site’s users (4Chan). While I could name some of the things they have done, that would be breaking rules #1 and #2, so I’ll just mention some that have reached mainstream media. A group called Anonymous began waging a war upon the Church of Scientology, which, until then, was virtually impossible to do and win. They staged protests with Guy Fawkes masks at CoS sites around the US, they successfully defeated the DMCA takedown notices the church’s lawyers had been so successful at regarding anything that could be perceived as bad press on the net, and they enabled ex-members who were too afraid of the Church to come out and speak of their experiences in public. Some other campaigns and antics that have shown just how influential moot’s site has become includes slipping fake news onto national broadcasts, having Oprah say a meme unwittingly on her show, and…hacking the Time.com poll.
Just think about the things you don’t know about and the significance of how much power moot has and can, if provoked, threaten the security of the most complex security systems. More after the jump.
