Sony Sites Downed by Anonymous DDoS

Several Sony websites have experienced downtime during the last 24 hours as a result of distributed denial-of-service attacks mounted by the Anonymous collective.

The hacktivist group announced that it will target Sony in an open letter posted online yesterday, which accused the company of breaching the privacy of numerous individuals and acting against freedom of information principles.

"You have victimized your own customers merely for possessing and sharing information, and continue to target those who seek this information. In doing so you have violated the privacy of thousands of innocent people who only sought the free distribution of information.

"Your suppression of this information is motivated by corporate greed and the desire for complete control over the actions of individuals who purchase and use your products, at least when those actions threaten to undermine the corrupt stranglehold you seek to maintain over copywrong, oops, 'copyright'," the group said.

According to The Register, the UK PlayStation 3 website as well as the European PlayStation Store server were offline earlier today. Other websites belonging to the company might also have been targeted.

Anonymous says it wants to give Sony a taste of its own medicine. The group claims Sony attacks people's rights over their property because it doesn't want them to jailbreak, so in response it will attack their domains because it doesn't like their actions.

Sony has taken a hard-line position regarding jailbreaking after PS3 hacker George Hotz, aka geohot, reverse-engineered and published the private key used to sign all software that runs on the gaming console.

The company's lawyers convinced a judge to order geohot's web hoster, Bluehost, to produce all access logs for the hacker's website. Similar subpoenas were sent to Google and Twitter for visitor data from his blog, YouTube and Twitter accounts.

Sony also filed a criminal complaint in Germany against PS3 hacker Alexander Egorenkov, aka Graf_Chokolo, which led to his apartment being raided by police.