By Christopher Jones, TecMarc Technology Services
It had only been a couple of days that I had purchased the latest Mortal Kombat game. I had gotten one chance to test out its online playability and found myself greatly enjoying it. Later in the evening, having completed everything necessary for the day, I decided to make another attempt at playing online, testing my skill against different people from around the world (although, sadly not in Australia, as the game had been banned there). Unfortunately, when I attempted to login to my Playstation Network account, the screen displayed the error, “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of Playstation Network (80710A06).” This indicated that either something was wrong with my wireless connection with the Playstation 3 (the less likely case), or that the network was down.
Turns out it was not just down; someone had hacked the network. One would have thought with a company as large as Sony was and the reputation they had for supporting quality products, they would have had a larger security. When the truth appeared, Sony immediately faced a class action lawsuit against them for allowing 77 million accounts to leak their personal information, including credit card information (http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/229402362). It was also revealed that Sony had not installed a firewall to protect this network, not only making it fully susceptible to anyone to infiltrate but also going against the government policy to use outdated security to hold personal information. In order to gain further trust, Sony had three different teams step in to aid in upgrading their security, all the while working with the FBI and Homeland Security in order to find those responsible for the hack (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6312333/sony-knew-psn-had-no-firewall-installed-expert). Eventually, Sony came back online and as an apology to their customers, offered those affected free games and three months’ worth of premium membership.
This has not been the end of this problem. In the early days of the past month, several companies have faced similar hacking attacks, including Codemasters, Nintendo, Bethesda, Epic Games, Bioware, and Sega, all of whom suffered from the hacker group known as LulzSec (http://www.betanews.com/article/Sega-the-latest-victim-in-video-game-hacking-epidemic/1308579793). The main goal and ideology behind this group is not for gaining profit from these attacks, but rather for the thrill of accomplishing the task; there is an almost sociopathic sense of knowing that what they are doing is wrong but not caring, only to gain a thrill at the expense of larger companies and their users. Within their stated manifesto also revealed the notion that they wanted to point out the flaws in as many systems as possible, perhaps hoping that these attacks will give the organizations a stronger notion of what to fix and also for users to remain on guard in changing their information elsewhere so that they could remain guarded against more malevolent hackers who could actually steal their identities. Such notions could easily be channeled into what companies refer to as “ethical hacking,” in which IT teams look for specific holes within the network they could exploit and report them their given architect; LulzSec, however, is doing this entirely unauthorized, causing the FBI to take further response on the counts of fraud and computer misuse under the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act (http://www.webcitation.org/5zdVEI7rE). With as widespread as this group remains, it would be difficult to find each individual member.
Other companies are remaining on guard for any further attacks.
When will this end? For the past two months, it goes without saying that this has been a major upset to the gaming community. While it has been a public nuisance, it goes beg the question of how safe these various systems really are. Can these companies optimize their system to fit these growing threats? They must, or their reputation and trust of their users will falter greatly.
Good article! however, lulzsec not the confirmed hackers for all. user from ANON are still making claims, and lulzsec actually offered to help Sega catch their attackers (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/19/tech/cnettechnews/main20072366.shtml)
ReplyDeleteUpdate: LulzSec did not hack Sega; the same article there states this. It was my mistake and I apologize for it. They do, however, claim responsibility to some of the other hacks, including Nintendo. Better wording should have been "some" and not "all."
ReplyDeleteSome members of Anonymous claim responsibility for the Sony hack. When the threat to release personal information arose, some were very adamant about how much Anonymous is opposed to taking and using personal information.