14 DAY TRIAL // An Anonymous hacker claims to have hacked Sony’s PlayStation Network, stealing 50 gigabytes' worth of information. Sony representatives have denied the hacker’s claims and evidence suggests that they may be right.
“Think outside the box. I am a man with no name, I'm the man behind Anonymous, hence ‘master & card visa takedown in 2010.’ FBI, will you seize the innocent doors, or a devil behind that door who's staring right at'cha?,” the hacker wrote next to the leaked data.
“I got no Twitter, Facebook, neither I go in IRC.. If someone takes credit for this pwnage, he's a [expletive]. What's the target? It's SONY, [expletive]. About 10 million [users] at risk. Yes, if you play playstation network, you're included.”
It wouldn’t be the first time when someone breaches Sony and the thousands of email addresses and password hashes left many wondering if hackers had succeeded once again.
So, what is the evidence which suggests that the data leak may be a fake?
First of all, in his statement, the hacker asks those who want the complete 50 gigabyte database to contact him at a certain email address. However, this address – [email protected] – doesn’t seem to exist.
Furthermore, by comparing the email addresses and the password hashes to older data dumps, we have been able to determine that much of it seems to be copied from older hacks.
One of them was from March 2012 and it targeted security solutions provider Universe Security. Much of the data is copied from there.
The details also appear to be taken from a file published by SweZec, containing some 10,000 email addresses and their associated password hashes. According to the hackers, the data belongs to users from Sweden.
All this evidence and Sony’s statement (they probably wouldn’t lie about it if 10 million users were exposed) indicates that this is another fake hack.