Set Sail for the Lulz

Lulzsec was an organized group of hackers for approximately fifty days. They hacked a number of important, or at the very least high profile organizations. Their stated purpose: “For the lulz”, but was it? If one looks at the list of targets Lulzsec has effectively pursued would anyone honestly be able to say that they had no agenda aside from fun? Their recent list of targets includes, Sony, PBS, the CIA, Arizona state law enforcement, theEscapist, EVE Online, League of Legends, Bethesda software, a number ofpornographic websites, and a host of others.

A cursory glance at that list two stand out, the CIA and Arizona’s law enforcement websites being hacked are clearly not just “for the lulz”.  One who has been following news on the internet, rather than just drooling on their keyboards and playing flashgames would be quick to point out that PBS’s website being hacked was in response to a Frontline documentary about Wikileaks. Lulzsec has taken a great deal of responsibility for the PSN and additional Sony hacks, and given how many flaws there were in their security systems, I don’t blame them one bit. It could be considered a public service to point out such glaring holes in one's security. Their attacks on many others have been more annoying than properly offensive (denial of service attacks against the escapist, EVE online, and League of Legends), but they are still certainly frustrating to those who depend on those resources for income. 

Many people are referring to Lulzsec and Anonymous as “hacktivists”, so clearly this analysis that Lulzsec isn’t just in it “for the lulz” is a widespread understanding. It appears that despite their tenacious attacks on so many varying targets Lulzsec has officially announced recently that they will be disbanding, whether due to infighting, the international crackdown on hacking activity, or whatever other reasons can be concocted for Lulzsec to walk away from the limelight at the top of their game. Maybe the members of Lulzsec are content to return to Anonymous and return to their much larger group’s plans, or maybe it’s a show of unity, Shortly before Lulzsec announced that they would be dissolved they had begun publically partnering with Anonymous for future attacks, to build up a larger “army” of hackers and others devoted to disruptive or anarchistic activity. I’ve never felt a compulsion to delve into hacking myself, but I can certainly say that some of the things Lulzsec has stood for have been both newsworthy, and have been effective in knocking people off their high and mighty pedestal. My not being able to use any of the nice online features of my PS3 for quite some time notwithstanding, I can say that I generally support the “hacktivist” movement, though not necessarily the backlash that seems to be coming from it. For what it’s worth, I will leave you with both the Lulzsec mission statement, and a link to their final announcement:

“Hello, good day, and how are you? Splendid! We're LulzSec, a small team of lulzy individuals who feel the drabness of the cyber community is a burden on what matters: fun. Considering fun is now restricted to Friday, where we look forward to the weekend, weekend, we have now taken it upon ourselves to spread fun, fun, fun, throughout the entire calender year.”

Final Announcement

Sometimes You Just Can't Hack It

Sony as a company has had their share of interesting bumps in the road, but none quite as notable as the current security issues they’ve been having across the board. Security issues this year alone have included the over three week down time experienced by the Playstation Network, and a series of other information stealing attacks on their various other services. Sony-Ericsson recently experienced an attack levied solely by SQL-Injection (using standard SQL calls entered directly into text fields that will likely be processed into a database query). Various groups of hackers are being blamedfor the attacks, and with the speed of information being spread around the internet, the attacks are spreading, and growing in number. One of the strangest things that I’ve been reminded of by this whole affair is that this can all be pointed back to, and blamed upon Nintendo.

While Sony certainly cannot blame Nintendo for previous failures like the Betamax, which failed for a litany of reasons despite its smaller form factor, and higher video and audio quality when compared to VHS. Sony can blame their entry into the video gaming industry solely on a contract they had signed with Nintendo all the way back at the height of the Nintendo/Sega feud in the late '80s/early '90s. Nintendo signed contracts with both Phillips and Sony to develop a disc reading expansion utility for the SNES system. While to many gamers it is clear that this never came to fruition, the project with Sony was left to grow for a rather long time before it was officially cancelled. Sony had laid a great deal of the groundwork for what would become the original Playstation on Nintendo’s dime. Continuing forth from that Sony executives were staunchly against creating a game system of their own to rival Nintendo, but the lead engineer on the project persuaded (more accurately, he repeatedly goaded his bosses about how embarrassing it was that Nintendo had jilted them for a partnership with Phillips instead). Still Sony execs were against the console staunchly enough to move production to the Sony Music division.

Sony of course came out ahead in the short run, with the tremendous success of the Playstation, selling over 100million units, and the eventual success of the Playstation 2. The real trouble for Sony came in when the original Microsoft Xbox provided network support. Those of us who weren’t social enough to have friends over to play Mortal Kombat were no longer relegated to playing Diablo 2 on our PCs; we could go on Xbox live and troll games of Halo. This forced Sony’s hand in rushing their Playstation Network to market with an Ethernet adapter for the PS2. That early iteration was a poor implementation of the software, and hardly even a shell of what the current PSN is. Sony may have a huge gap in their understanding of security standards, but we wouldn’t even know it if their executives over 20 years ago weren’t so prideful as to demand they try to best Nintendo at their own game.

As a matter of complete disclosure, I own all three current generation systems, and probably play my PS3 more than the other two. I was not initially a fan of the PS3 for a number of reasons, but I did eventually cave in and buy one second hand. Sony has proved me wrong on a great number of things with this system, and I am rather pleased with my experience overall with the PS3, but I’m also not one to buy much DLC, so my credit card number wasn’t one of the many at risk. Don’t get this confused, I’m far from blaming Nintendo for Sony’s inept security, much more this is meant to demonstrate how one small action can eventually lead to monumental success, and subsequently embarrassing failure.