14 DAY TRIAL // Anonymous, the loosely organized group of Internet activists known as much for their bombastic rhetoric as for their actions, has announced that it plans to once again go after Sony, because of its support for its Stop Online Piracy bill, but plans to do so without creating the same amount of chaos as the PlayStation Network outage did during last year.
Anonymous now says, “Your support of the act is a signed death warrant to Sony Company and Associates. Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not.”
From information taken from the internal forums and chat channels of the Anonymous group it seems that the senior members of the organization are now more interested in defacing websites, taking down services for limited amounts of time and digging up and then posting personal information about the leadership of the Sony, especially those who are directly implicated in anti-piracy efforts.
After Sony went aggressively after Geohot, the man who finally managed to penetrate all the protections of the PlayStation 3 after the removal of OtherOS features, Anonymous denounced the company and launched a public campaign against it.
In April 2011 the PlayStation Network was hacked and a huge amount of personal information, including credit card data, was stolen by perpetrators.
Sony pointed the finger at Anonymous but the group denied that it was behind the attack and said that some of its members might have been working on their own to bring down the service.
The PSN was down for more than one month and since then a number of other video game related companies became the targets of hackers, although the incidents were limited in scope.