In a letter to a House panel, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America, said that the company discovered that the intruders who had stolen the data planted a file on one of the SOE servers with the name “Anonymous” and the group’s tagline “We are Legion.”
The letter explained that weeks before the breach, Sony had been the target of a large-scale coordinated denial of service attack by Anonymous in protest against Sony pursuing a civil lawsuit against a hacker in a US District Court in San Francisco.
Sony had filed a lawsuit against George Hotz who hacked PlayStation 3 to run unauthorized Linux OS software and published his discovery of codes embedded in the console that would allow others to carry out a similar hack. Sony settled the case with Hotz last month.
Sony said that the denial of service attack may have been a cover for the massive data theft, although it could not be certain.
“Whether those who participated in the denial of service attacks were conspirators or whether they were simply duped into providing cover for a very clever thief, we may never know. In any case, those who participated in the denial of service attacks should understand that – whether they knew it or not – they were aiding a well planned, well executed, large-scale theft that left not only Sony a victim, but also Sony’s many customers around the world”, Hirai explained.
Anonymous has vehemently denied being responsible for the Sony data theft. In a May 4 statement, Anonymous said it would never engage in the theft of personal information such as credit card numbers.
"Whoever broke into Sony's servers to steal the credit card info and left a document blaming Anonymous clearly wanted Anonymous to be blamed for the most significant digital theft in history. No one who is actually associated with our movement would do something that would prompt a massive law enforcement response. On the other hand, a group of standard online thieves would have every reason to frame Anonymous in order to put law enforcement off the track”, the group said in its statement.