Anonymous Denies Sony's Accusations Over PlayStation Network Hack

Sony's cloud-based entertainment network remains down, and the company is now pointing fingers at prominent hacker collective Anonymous.

On Wednesday, Sony sent a letter to members of the U.S. Congress explaining the massive network hack, which has compromised the data of up to 100 million accounts around the world. According to the statement, Sony now believes that customers' credit cards were the target all along. Sony also claimed that a recent denial-of-service attack by Anonymous prevented the company from protecting itself against other, more malicious security threats.

Sony also claimed that, while investigating the current outage, analysts discovered a file titled "Anonymous" that contained part of the group's slogan, "We are Legion." Sony has concluded that Anonymous was either a "conspirator" in the latest attack that brought down the network, or "they were simply duped into providing cover for a very clever thief."

Denying all involvement, Anonymous has responded with a statement of its own, reprinted by The Guardian. An excerpt reads,

Anonymous has never been known to have engaged in credit card theft. [...] Public support is not gained by stealing credit card info and personal identities, we are trying to fight criminal activities by corporations and governments, not steal credit cards. [...] While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our "leadership" does not condone credit card theft. We are concerned with erosion of privacy and fair use, the spread of corporate feudalism, the abuse of power and the justifications of executives and leaders who believe themselves immune personally and financially for the actions they undertake in the name of corporations and public office.

Anonymous was quick to distance itself from the PlayStation Network outage in late April, when Sony first took the service offline.

Sony has said it will begin restoring service sometime this week.