Hacking collective Anonymous had some grand plans with their attacks on Sony in defense of the PS3 infringement lawsuit against George “GeoHot” Hotz, but reports indicate that the company has not been terribly inconvenienced by the actions.
A source with the company has said that the Anonymous DDoS attacks designed to take down Sony’s web operations are of “medium strength” and have only "annoyed our network engineers."
Indeed, Sony’s servers have seen some service interruptions this week since the attacks began as Anonymous members flooded the companies servers with their Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) utilities, but the hackers don’t quite seem to have the manpower to sustain their efforts long term. A source with Sony’s hosting provider stated that engineers were blacklisting large batches of IP addresses as the attacks occurred. Sony has also enlisted the help of DDoS mitigation service Prolexic to help deal with the situation.
The Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) website had originally been targeted as part of the attacks, however Anonymous reversed their course when some supporters began complaining about the service outages. “Why take out the PSN. It hurts the average online player more than Sony itself,” a comment on AnonNews read on Wednesday, with several others echoing those sentiments. Soon thereafter, the attacks on PSN stopped and an apology was issued.
Attacks on other servers continue, however, and the long term defense strategy seems to be simply waiting for Anonymous members to get frustrated and give up. "They're going to get bored," a source told ArsTechnica Friday.
Who can hold out the longest? At this point it’s anyone’s guess. Stay tuned for more on this story as information becomes available.
