It seems this mess involving hackers is nowhere near over yet. According to Kotaku, the Spanish police have just arrested three individuals that were allegedly involving with hacking Playstation Network. Although the three suspects have been freed without bail, formal charges are pending, and they face a sentence of as many as three years in prison if they should be convicted.
Interestingly enough, the Anonymous group responded, but not about the arrest. Instead, they left this message on their Twitter, often used for public statements: “Dear @policia, Expect us. #Anonymous.”
Does this mean Anonymous is going to target the police as well? This doesn’t seem appropriate, as Anonymous is interested in fighting groups that oppress consumer rights and free speech on the internet, not policemen doing their job. Perhaps earlier speculation of the group becoming divided has some merit to it.
And as if the continuing saga of the PSN hack wasn’t enough, it turns out other game companies are being hit as well. Nintendo’s servers were hacked not too long ago, and now Codemasters has suffered a similar intrusion, though thankfully no credit card info is at risk. While the hacking on Nintendo’s servers turned out to be “benign”, the intent behind attacking Codemasters is uncertain, and is the second time within the span of a month the company has been targeted, forcing them to take down their website.
It is interesting to note that all three of these companies have been hacked, and made reports in a similarly delayed fashion. A lot of the anger at Sony stemmed from the week-late report on the hacking, but perhaps this is an indication that these kinds of security breaches aren’t easy to detect, and may require some time and work to ascertain. If you’re still hot-headed about Sony’s handling of the situation, perhaps you should consider this before slinging more insults at the company.
More perturbing however is that these intrusions are almost becoming a regular event. Is this because of expert hacking, or is this an indication that the online security of game developers in general needs extra work? Although neither is pleasant, I sincerely hope for the former, as I don’t feel very comfortable with the idea that any account and info I have with any game company could be at risk due to lackluster security.
