2011-06-03
By David Adams
The Sony Pictures website has suffered a serious security breach, targeted by hackers who claim to have stolen the email addresses and passwords of 50,000 consumers who had registered for online promotions. This latest episode in Sony’s increasingly damaging ongoing hacking ordeal is another powerful reminder to organisations of all kinds of the risks associated with online service provision and will make many in the film and TV industries feel particularly threatened.
Sony has been the victim of a series of hacking attacks since April, when hackers stole personal data from 77 million PlayStation Network accounts, an incident which the company has said will cost at least $170 million. Since then the company has suffered at least four more security breaches before the attack on Sony Pictures. A group of hackers called LulzSec has claimed responsibility for the hack, which it claimed was based on exploitation of a single SQL injection vulnerability.
LulzSec claimed it had been able to access information relating to more than 1 million consumers but did not possess the resources to copy more than a small amount of the data. It announced the hack in a press release that also castigated Sony’s security capabilities. “Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it’s just a matter of taking it,” it said. “This is disgraceful and insecure: they were asking for it.”
Sony has provided no comment on these claims other than to say that they are under investigation.
LulzSec appears to be trying to make a name for itself as an agent of retribution against various corporate actions that it deems unacceptable. At the end of May the group hacked into and digitally vandalised the website of the US broadcaster PBS, after the airing of a documentary that was critical of Wikileaks and the presumed source of that website’s infamous US cables story, ex-serviceman Bradley Manning. As well as stealing sensitive information the hackers posted a bizarre fake news story about deceased, formerly feuding rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls living near to one another in New Zealand.
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