Battle between Sony and hackers escalate

Hackers, who have been causing repeated havoc on Sony networks, continued to defy the company by posting personal data and escalating rhetoric against the firm.

The personal details of 2,500 people were posted to a site earlier this morning, originating from a database created in 2001, a Sony spokeswoman said. The move ads insult to injury

While the company quickly took down the information, the move highlights the escalating battle between the electronic giant and the hacker community.

For weeks Sony has been in the crosshairs of digital vigilantes, forcing the company to shut down several services and issue public apologies and reparations to customers affected.

In April Sony was forced to take down its massive Playstation gaming network after attackers infiltrated and acquired personal data on nearly 80 million customers -- one of the largest security breaches in history. Services have yet to be restored as the company wants to test the system's strength in these respects.

Then, on Monday, Sony learned SOE, which runs games such as DC Universe Online, had also been attacked, affecting an additional 24 million accounts.

The origins spur from a lawsuit brought against a hardware hacker George Hotz, who for months have been posting exploits of the Playstation 3 system onto his personal website. In perusing Hotz and those who gained access to his information, Sony teamed with Internet Service Providers, Paypal and even YouTube to gain access to the IP addresses of users who viewed the content.

That move whipped digital vigilantes into a frenzy, and became a rallying cry for hackers to organize and take aim at the Japanese giant, decrying what it saw to be gross violations of digital privacy.

One group, calling it self Anonymous, said that the move was just the beginning and that it would not forgive the company for its privacy invasion.

Where the judicial system has failed, Anonymous will persevere, by standing up for the rights of everyone, not just those who dared to challenge these corporations, the group said on April 14, calling its members to action.

It went on to launch several denial of service attacks to Sony properties, flooding its servers with requests in attempts to overload them, before moving on to what it says would be other ways of getting Sony's attention.

It has roundly denied the more serious data-breaches that involved the loss of personal data and nearly 10 million credit cards, but Sony is saying its investigations point the finger squarely at the group.

When Sony Online Entertainment discovered this past Sunday afternoon that data from its servers had been stolen, it also discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of those servers named 'Anonymous' with the words 'We are Legion,' Sony wrote in a letter to Congress.

The group insists it was the result of someone seeking to frame them, but they just yesterday made the call for further attacks against Sony in an Internet Relay Chat room, according to CNET reports.

Should the planned attack succeed, it would be the latest blow in a series of devastating security breaches for the Japanese company.