Sony has blamed the online
vigilante group Anonymous for indirectly allowing the
security breach that allowed a hacker to gain access to the personal data of more than 100m online gamers.
In a letter to the
House Energy and Commerce Committee's panel on commerce, manufacturing and trade, Sony said the breach came at the same time as it was fighting a
denial-of-service attack from Anonymous, also they discovered a file planted on one of its servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion," the tagline for the group that has brought down the websites of big corporations such as Visa, the letter said.
In response, Anonymous released a statement Wednesday denying the allegations, but did allow that individual members may have been involved.
"Sony is incompetent," the group said. "While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves
AnonOps was not related to this incident and takes no responsibility."
In congressional testimony this morning, Dr. Gene Spafford of Purdue University said that Sony was using seriously outdated software on its servers and knew about it approximately three months before, the company was informed by security experts monitoring open Internet forums that its version of Apache Web Server was out of date.
