Hacker Group Vow to Destroy Sony

[Zanten]

padib said:

Zanten said:

Well... could be attention, you know? I mean, your suggestion was that we discuss 'Who Are These Mysterious Hackers? :O ' They've literally got their own TWITTER.

Because let's face it, if their plan is to 'destroy Sony,' they need bigger guns than what they've brought. DDoS strikes are annoying, and ties up servers while they are in effect, but they don't really do much in the way of permanent damage, and generally speaking won't linger around for longer than the folks are actively attacking. It doesn't hack into a server, so you can't steal data, it just clogs up all the traffic lanes so nobody else can get in. Unless the folks plan to keep the DDoS going for weeks, it'll be less of an inconvenience than the total blackout the PSN had during the genuine hacking incident, and the longer they DO keep them up, the more likely they're going to get tracked down, because they might as well be setting off a signal flare.

Whether they stop themselves, or have all their computers taken away from them in a week or two, the only net gain they'll have achieved is all kinds of people talking about them on the internet. Which is of course balanced against possible jail time/substantial fines/criminal record/god knows what else, so it would, actually, bring us to a legitimate 'These people are idiots.' That or they legitimately, outright dislike Sony, and have decided to risk jail time etc, etc, etc just to pester their servers for a few days or so, in which case, yeah, still idiots. o.O

Now, if they actually are shown to HAVE retrieved data- keep in mind we only have the word of one of these guys, and if 'getting attention' is the name of the game, they'd have every reason to claim otherwise- then we'd have to see what they got to determine if what they retrieved is worth all this effort. If they got something like credit card numbers, or even account info, okay, successful job. If they got surface-level, low-security chaff, then still idiots. xP

If they were able to refuse paid service to a group of people, it's damage. I agree that data is a LOT worse, but they are still losing money.

But again, the damage lasts as long as the attacks can be maintained, and the longer they are maintained, the easier and more quickly one is able to track you down and find where you are. Once you take your finger off the trigger, it's pretty easy to bounce back and get the servers back to normal, because, essentially, the traffic lanes are no longer clogged. Which brings us to the problem. There's a difference between inflicting damage during the immediate span of time- requiring your constant effort- and inflicting damage that will last. If the group in question had any aspirations of 'destroying' or even seriously hurting Sony, they needed to inflict damage that wouldn't simply go away after they stopped firing.

Which means either they HAD no intentions of seriously hurting Sony, and were simply showboating to draw a crowd, or they DID have intentions of hurting Sony, but were really short-sighted and didn't realize how inadequate their efforts would be.

(The third option is there's some super secret, diabolical master plan we don't know about, but we have to go off the information we have, not start spinning 'what-ifs')

Sony loses... less than a day of service? A bit of bad PR- which it's going to be more than capable of pushing onto the hacking group responsible- and in the end, a bit of a headache. The hackers in question, at best, get away with their freedoms intact, and at worst get blacklisted as hackers, imprisoned, restricted from computer access, etc.