Sony Confirms Playstation Network Brought Down By External Attack: Art Imitates Life, Or Is It the Other Way Around?

Talk about convergence: cyberwar, gamification, wikileaks and Japan! How many memes can be combined in one story? The serious implication is that following Amazon's 'cloud-burst' this week, network security has taken front and center in the debate about the future of the web. As it should. People tend to assume that a service they generally use without incident will always be there and that unfettered access to it has, in effect, become a right. Dream on. Lots of advocates with lots of different agendas are looking to make a point that lots and lots of people can't miss. Disrupting the 'net is a good way to do that.

The question is what this may mean to the net neutrality debate (one could envision opponents seizing upon the security issue as a further reason to oppose neutrality). This could also lead to calls for imposition of fees or other restrictions. There will be claims that freedom ain't free. Keep an eye on this one. Dean Takahashi reports in Venture Beat:

"Sony acknowledged today that its PlayStation Network online entertainment service was brought down by an external intrusion, according to a blog post this evening.

The network has 70 million registered users and it is Sony’s gateway to online entertainment on the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable. Frustrated users have been without service since Wednesday. Sony’s Qriocity music service was also attacked an brought down. Sony has kept the services off while it conducts an investigation into what happened.

Patrick Seybold, a spokesman for Sony, said in the post, “An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocity services. In order to conduct a thorough investigation and to verify the smooth and secure operation of our network services going forward, we turned off PlayStation Network & Qriocity services on the evening of Wednesday, April 20th. Providing quality entertainment services to our customers and partners is our utmost priority. We are doing all we can to resolve this situation quickly, and we once again thank you for your patience. We will continue to update you promptly as we have additional information to share.”

On Friday, the hacker group Anonymous denied that it was to blame for the attack. Until now, Sony offered no explanation for the network outage, prompting some to wonder if it was related to Amazon.com’s crash of its cloud computing infrastructure, EC 2, which has also been down since yesterday. Sony had also updated its PlayStation Home virtual world for gamers with a version 1.5 update. And others wondered if hackers, who had been angry about Sony’s prosecution of hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz, had found a way to “jailbreak” Sony’s PS 3 so that users could download unauthorized or pirated software. Sony sued him for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

But that case has been settled. And Anonymous, the hacker group that had attack Sony sites earlier, said it was not behind the shutdown. In fact, Anonymous said “Sony is incompetent.” Still, an observer of the IRC forum used by members of Anonymous speculated that the attackers likely behind this current Sony outage appear to have learned their methods from Anonymous’ activities of two weeks ago