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Obviously, the main current concern is who was responsible. Suspicion first fell on Anonymous, a group known for carrying out DDOS attacks on companies such as Mastercard and Amazon after the Wikileaks affair. A DDOS attack is a distributed denial of service where the website is spammed by so many requests that the website breaks down. Anonymous had warned Sony that they had seen “a hornet’s nest and stuck your penis in it”. This was in response to certain updates of Sony’s software and the prosecution of a hacker for modifying the software to run Linux, an alternative operating system. However, Anonymous has denied responsibility and Sony had corroborated this, until recently it U-turned and accused Anonymous of conducting a DDOS attack at the same time as a hacking event.. The possibility that Anonymous, or an offshoot of Anonymous is responsible is not out of the question, but it does seem a measure by Sony to deflect questions about their own incompetence.
The assault raises serious queries about the security of online websites. Sony’s is only the latest to be hacked but with far more serious consequences to its users. Most likely some sort of charge will have to be incurred, much like the Xbox live subscription, which has had no downtime. It will raise questions about the security of online gaming. This has been the juggernaut sector of growth in the gaming industry. From Borderlands to the Halo series, games now rely on online content to balance out what can be quite lacklustre single-player campaigns. If this mode of gameplay is called into question, it raises worrying aspects about gaming’s future if a medium that many now take for granted is no longer viable.
More specifically, the focus now is on Sony’s future. Having won the previous two generational console battles with the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2 this generation’s battle has been much more split, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 dueling for the traditional market, whereas the Wii (until the advent of Kinect and Move) went for a much more casual audience. Now its security has been comprehensively breached in all areas, it looks like a volatile time in the console market.
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