The security breach of the week goes to... (drum roll please...) Sony! The website for Sony Pictures France was hacked Monday, June 20th, and 177,172 emails were taken through a SQL injection attack. As CNET notes, it was the same method used against SonyPictures.com, Sony Pictures Russia, Sony Ericsson, and Sony Music Entertainment Japan. The hacker community's ownage of Sony has spawned a new term: sownage.
The term is appearing on Twitter and numerous other websites. The term even has its own Facebook page. The DataLossDB website posted an article discussing that while it was attempting to track everyone involved with the Epsilon breach the rapidly occurring attacks on Sony kept them working overtime just updating the database.
In order to keep track of all the sownage there is now posted a concise history of Sony hacks. The site lists 20 separate hacks between April 26 and June 20 of this year. What is not often conveyed in the news is that these attacks are separate events. Thus, the 100+ million accounts that have been compromised were not from a coordinated effort. The article sums this up well saying,
If anyone... ANYONE at all uses the term "advanced persistent threat" in describing the attacks on Sony, please hit them very hard before disregarding them as ignorant charlatans hell-bent on serving their own interests. Given the wide variety of attackers (see below), the attacks on Sony can only be described as an uncoordinated effort at best.
The 20 attacks don't even include the number of DDoS attacks against Sony. Perhaps the worst part about these attacks against Sony, as well as those against other organizations, is that they have not been sophisticated ones. Many of them are basic SQL injection attacks (the number one method of attack).
The hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec have made headlines as chief participants in some of the major breaches, but the one against Sony Pictures France goes to a hacker going by the name of Idahc. According to an interview with Forbes he is an 18-year old from Lebanon. He considers himself a grey hat hacker (as opposed to white and black hat hackers) in that he seeks to make the internet more secure by provoking companies to fix their security flaws. Unlike other hacking groups, instead of selling or publicizing the entire database he posted just a few of the emails on pastebin.
Hopefully, corporations will begin to implement basic security features on their website to prevent becoming sowned. Until then, keep up with the latest sownage by following the DataLossDB on Twitter or at Yahoo Pipes.
Source: SecurityPro
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