Geohot Speaks Out About Latest PSN Attack

"It was Sony's lawsuit against George Hotz that prompted hacker group Anonymous to wage war on Sony earlier this month. Anonymous might very well not have anything to do with the theft of PSN users' personal information -- it denies any involvement -- but Sony's litigiousness may have been what prompted the infiltration by hackers. If you thought there was any chance Hotz was somehow involved, think again.

"To anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I'm not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door," he wrote on his blog earlier today. "Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone elses server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at d****es like Sony."

Hotz, who was partially responsible for uncovering the PlayStation 3's root key earlier this year, asked that people not blame the engineers responsible for PSN's security but the executives who decided to draw the attention of the hacking community. "Also, let's not fault the Sony engineers for this, the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the BMG rootkit," Hotz said. "The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea."

Hotz went on to speculate about how PSN was infiltrated and Sony's shortcomings (according to his theory) as compared with other companies. "Notice it's only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted," he noted. "Because other companies aren't crazy."

Hotz might not be the most unbiased person to discuss Sony -- this is, after all, a company that sued him and, in some people's eyes, unfairly tried to balloon his legal costs by fighting for the case to be tried in California.

"To the perpetrator, two things. You are clearly talented and will have plenty of money(or a jail sentence and bankruptcy) coming to you in the future. Don't be a dick and sell people's information," he continued. "And I'd love to see a write up on how it all went down...lord knows we'll never get that from Sony, noobs probably had the password set to '4' or something. I mean, at least it was randomly generated."

Sony has yet to provide an update on the PSN situation today. As of yesterday, the company said it expected "some services" to come back online by next Tuesday. It's working with a law enforcement agency and security firm to investigate the attack, which it deemed a "criminal act."