Showbiz sweats hacker attacks

No one in the entertainment world wants to be Sony these days.

After a security breach resulted in the theft of personal information in more than 100 million user accounts, it didn’t seem things could get much worse. But a series of rapid-fire smaller hacks to sites in Canada, Thailand and Indonesia — along with an exploit on Sony’s PlayStation site that temporarily put accounts at risk again — continued to endanger the company’s reputation with consumers.

Instead of the muffled competitive snickering that usually occurs when a rival stumbles, other entertainment companies have watched in fear as the drama has played out, knowing that their own online operations were spared only by the whim of the hacking community.

Read more at Daily Variety

Hackers Take Down Sony’s PlayStation Network

Hackers have managed to cut Sony off at the knees in several of the most competitive aspects of this generation of video games.

For the past five days, the PlayStation Network has been offline—making it impossible for PlayStation 3 owners to play multiplayer games, download updates to titles or use their PS3 to stream movies and music. This represents the most serious outage the service has faced since its start in 2006.

Read more at CNBC.com

The Shared Enemy of Hollywood, Gene Simmons and Hustler

It takes extraordinary circumstances to unite Hollywood filmmakers, one of rock’s most outlandish stars and a porn company. But when you’re facing off against 4chan, any ally is a good one.

4chan, for the unfamiliar, is the Internet’s most infamous message and image board. And its denizens are the online equivalent of Beetlejuice. Mutter their name and they’ll appear, but you may not like the results.

Read more at CNBC.com

 

4chan hacks MPAA, RIAA websites

Frequenters of infamous U.S.-based website 4chan.org have declared war on Hollywood.

Its users led the charge in a distributed denial of service attack on the MPAA and RIAA websites Monday — blocking their pages for hours.

The move, say the anonymous attackers, was in retaliation to action the orgs have taken to squash filesharing sites such as Pirate Bay.

Read more in Daily Variety