The boss of Sony says he believes the hacking attack that took down the company's PlayStation network was revenge for the legal action the company took against 21-year-old US hacker George Hotz.
According to the Independent newspaper, Sir Howard Stringer, says:
"We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our intellectual property, our content, in this case video games."Sony took Hotz - known as Geohot - to court in the US after he hacked the PlayStation games console, but eventually dropped the action. Days later, hackers got into the PS3 on-line network and accessed personal details of 77-million users, including - porentially - credit card information.
Sony had to shut down the network while it was repaired at a cost of millions of pounds.
No-one is accusing Hotz of carrying out the attack, but Sony certainly believes it was revenge for the legal action it took.
It was revealed earlier this week that Hotz, who was the first hacker to unlock the iPhone, is now working for Facebook. It's not known what his job is, but it's thought he could be working on the social network's anti-hacking defences.
(Via: The Independent)Mr Hotz is straight out of hacker central casting, a teenage computer genius who grew up in New Jersey and was identified early as a talented youngster, attending a special programme for bright children from the US state school system. He led his school in national robot-building championships and appeared on national television demonstrating his creations.It was in 2008 that he achieved fame in the hacker community for conducting the first so-called "jailbreak" of an Apple iPhone. His hack allowed users to get round Apple's tight controls on what apps can be downloaded to the phone and which mobile phone networks it can be used on.
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