Sony yesterday singled out Anonymous for its role in the PlayStation Network data breach, but Anonymous has its own view—namely, "Sony is incompetent." As for the evidence against them, the group believes it is being targeted by a "false flag op."

Back on April 22, parts of the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous were already denying responsibility for taking down Sony's PlayStation Network. "For Once We Didn't Do It," proclaimed their manifesto.

"While it could be the case that other Anons have acted by themselves, AnonOps was not related to this incident and takes no responsibility for it. A more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous' previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact the outage is actually an internal problem with the company's servers."

The denials have been coming thick and fast ever since. Certainly, Anonymous had targeted Sony—with some Anons posting creepy messages about Sony execs and their children—but the technical attacks were supposedly limited to data floods against various Sony websites.

When the PlayStation Network went down, Anons at first worried they may have been responsible and that their tactics were alienating the very gamers in whose name they were acting. (The entire campaign was a response to Sony's lawsuit against PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, which was recently settled out of court.) But they quickly and publicly declared that they had nothing to do with the PlayStation Network's ongoing downtime.

In the Anonymous chat channel #OpSony, a message went up once: "#Opsony is over. Mission accomplished. #OpSony is not responsible for the current downtime of PSN. Whatever problems Sony have, they are nothing whatsoever to do with us. kthxbai. | DON'T ASK US IF THE PSN IS UP, WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT!"

In #SonyRecon, a channel which had once been used for to share stories about prank calling the wife of a Sony exec and similar behavior, the message was the same: "We didn't do it either."

In the #Hackers channel, admins posted a standing request for information: "If you know who hacked the Sony PSN, please PM [private message] HipLo."

"A false flag op"



Sony said yesterday that the denial of service attack from Anonymous made it hard to notice a hacker sneaking into their systems, thus making the case that Anonymous provided at least unintentional support for the person or persons who made off with personal details of all of Sony's users. The PlayStation Network was shut down while this serious breach was investigated, and Sony tried to determine if user credit card data was taken, too (something that remains unclear; Sony says it has no reports of fraud from banks yet).

Sony also says that it found files named "Anonymous" on its servers, and that the files contained the well-known Anonymous tag "We Are Legion."

The accusation infuriated many Anons. One group late yesterday blasted out a public letter arguing that Anonymous wasn't responsible for any of this because:

"Anonymous has never been know to have engaged in credit card theft."

"Many of our corporate and governmental adversaries, on the other hand, have been known to have lied to the public about Anonymous about their own activities There is no corporation in existence [that] will choose the truth when lies are more convenient."

"Anonymous is an ironically transparent movement that allows reporters in to our operating channels to observe us at work."

But because no one "runs" Anonymous and there is no membership, these sorts of denials are never authoritative. The rank-and-file certainly believe that Sony is lying or that Anonymous is being set up, however. Barrett Brown, a common spokesperson for Anonymous activities, argued that it was a classic "false flag" operation against Anonymous.

NexusFlame: I think they're trying to save face NexusFlame: ya know.. get the attention off of them and on to the scapegoat BarrettBrown: That's very possible BarrettBrown: Those kinds of things have quite demonstrably been done in the past BarrettBrown: and Sony has every reason to deflect attention from their own failure to protect their customers' info BarrettBrown: And make the news cycle about Anonymous and its alleged crimes NexusFlame: I mean it's pretty simple to just insert a file in to the database and say "hey guys look! see? it was them!" BarrettBrown: Which is exactly what has happened today BarrettBrown: Yep NexusFlame: I mean it's pretty much bullshit.. seeing as anon stands for privacy and internet freedom.. and stealing credit cards is pretty much the exact fucking opposite Tef: it is, thats why i dont believe that they made it Tef: my thought would be some private hackers opAnon64: but what about the file they found on their servers it said anonymous we are legion BarrettBrown: Anyone could leave such a file BarrettBrown: We could break into a server and leave a file saying "Hai this is opAnon64 please arrest me!" opAnon64: ok, i get it BarrettBrown: That's the nature of a false flag op

The FBI is currently investigating the breach, and Sony has hired several different forensics firms to assist. In the meantime, Anonymous and its chaotic "ops" go on. The group has spent the last week flooding the New Zealand Parliament's website in anger over an Internet copyright bill; others Anons are hatching a plot against AT&T. Still other are upset at Norway, while others are trying to knock out Iranian websites.

These ops are more in the classic Anon style. Still, there are hints that Anonymous can be far more aggressive when it wants. The infamous HBGary hack was a coordinated operation organized in private chat channels that were not so "ironically transparent" as the rest, and the result was a serious intrusion and exfiltration of private e-mails.

And, when the attacks against Sony were still going strong, I received a curious e-mail from an Anon involved in the operation who had been booted from the group by one of its "leaders." Upset at his treatment, he wrote, "Today I am now an ex-member of Anonymous, as you may well have already seen [it was quite public]. However, I am in possession of some valuable information regarding Anonymous' next move Now I don't mind how you use the information I have - Report it to Sony, Make an Article of it etc etc - but I promise you, their plan will bring the entire SCEA network down."

Bravado? A reference to some new denial of service attack plan? Or something darker? The source never followed up on this promise to talk, so we are left only to say, as in so many things relating to Anonymous: who knows?