As news of the plans filtered out yesterday, DDoS attacks against Sony.com, the PlayStation site and the official PlayStation blog, started. These attacks are reported to have, at times, effectively caused the sites to disappear from the web.
Infosecurity notes that the PlayStation Network has also gone down, although an official Sony Twitter account claimed that this was due to "sporadic maintenance".
According to some news wires, an off-shoot of Anonymous called SonyRecon has turned its electronic sights on senior managers within Sony's corporate empire, and has appealed for personal information from internet users.
SonyRecon is reported to have already released the personal information of Sony executive Robert Wiesenthal, including his marital status, children, address and education.
According to the official Kotaku Sony blog, its reporters "have contacted Sony to find out if they believe these outages are due to Anonymous' attacks and, if not, what they're doing to prepare for them."
"Anonymous says they plan to attack Sony to punish the company for suing hacker George Hotz who cracked the PS3's firmware", said the news wire's latest posting on the saga,
"Hotz, also known as Geohot, is now embroiled in a legal and ethical conflict about whether he had a right to mess with Sony's tech or if they are protected by US law to keep him out and can both shut him down and look through his Paypal records to see who may have been giving him financial support", added the blog.
The Softpedia news wire, meanwhile, quotes a press statement from Anonymous as saying: "You have victimized your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information, and continue to target those who seek this information. In doing so you have violated the privacy of thousands of innocent people who only sought the free distribution of information."
"Your suppression of this information is motivated by corporate greed and the desire for complete control over the actions of individuals who purchase and use your products, at least when those actions threaten to undermine the corrupt stranglehold you seek to maintain over copywrong, oops, 'copyright'."
The news wire says that Anonymous says it wants to give Sony a taste of its own medicine, with group claiming that "Sony attacks people's rights over their property because it doesn't want them to jailbreak, so in response it will attack their domains because it doesn't like their actions."
"Sony has taken a hard-line position regarding jailbreaking after PS3 hacker George Hotz, aka geohot, reverse-engineered and published the private key used to sign all software that runs on the gaming console", said the news wire.