As I reported Yesterday, the online service PlayStation Network, which is available on Sony's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable consoles is currently down. Anybody who does try to sign in will be instead of being signed in, will be faced by error code 80710A06, which is a code regarding the servers being offline for maintenance.
The problem is that Sony have confirmed that the PSN service is not offline for maintenance. Here is the link to the US PlayStation blog, in which Patrick Seybold posted a statement which is the exact same as James Gallagher's post on the EU blog, of which I commented on yesterday. And here again is the link to that post on the EU blog.On the PlayStation EU Twitter feed they have not tweeted for what is now twenty hours, with the last tweet simply being a link to the EU blog post.
Apart from those minimal statements, Sony has given no word regarding this issue, which is known to have been ongoing since at least 7am yesterday morning. In response to this many gamers have been uploading videos of their failed log in attempts to Youtube, with many more commenting and expressing their anger over the situation.
As I posted yesterday, it is still thought that the hacking group Anonymous is responsible for the service outage. It is thought that the group have caused the outage by the means of a distributed denial of service attack, or DDos for short.
A DDos attack can be carried out in a number of ways, these include the group possibly consuming the bandwidth for the network by modding their system to automatically sign in and out of PSN repetitively, this being done many times constantly by many users could cause the service to overload and effectively lock itself down, although this seems highly unlikely given the size of PSN. Another way could be for them to have actually hacked the servers used for PSN and for them to either shut them down or have changed them to not allow any users to log in. A third way could be for the group to have simply blocked the communications that come to the servers, so that no information transactions can take place, hence allowing no one to log in.
This may all indeed seem very complex, but this is just a few of the methods that Anonymous may have used, if it is indeed them.
The group are the ones most likely to be suspected following the information I also posted yesterday, as they disagree with Sony's lawsuit against GeoHot, the modder who initially cracked the PS3's coding, allowing for pirated software to be run on the system.
Since yesterday I have also been looking in detail into the philosophy of Anonymous and the ways in which the group operate. The most important thing I came across is the fact that they operate as a hive-mind, with no one person in charge or more superior than another. Because of this it means that when a 'member' speaks publicly or addresses anyone from outside the group they must speak in terms of the whole of Anonymous and not single them self out, as doing so break their anonymity and defines them as a single member. The group operates so that the 'members' cannot refer to them self as a member, also meaning that overall Anonymous is not technically a group, but really many people using the same name, Anonymous. This probably does seem like a rather difficult thing to understand. This link is to one of Anonymous' videos posted on Youtube. This may help to explain this concept. Also, an Anonymous is many individuals, this could possibly mean that only a handful, or even one Anonymous person is carrying out these attacks.
So, for now that is another update regarding the outage situation. I will post any more news as the events develop, but it appears that who has caused this problem is not willing to stop until they have reached their goal.
Before I go, I would just like to sign off as always, saying is randomthings and thank you for reading.
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