Tech Security Bytes

As you might have heard (Source1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4), Sony has recently been the target of a cyberattack- with the Ransomed.vc extortion group claiming to have accessed “All of Sony systems”.

According to what’s been released by threat group Ransomed.vc, over 250+ GB of data has been stolen, and is currently up for grabs on the darknet. They’ve posted a PowerPoint deck from the contents (About 2 – 3 MB of content) to prove their hack.

The only problem? It seems they might not be the actual attackers.

In an interesting development, threat group MajorNelson has also claimed responsibility for the hack, mocking news media outlets and Ransomed.vc, and posted a much more compelling ~2.4 GB of stolen data, a superset of what Ransomed.vc posted…

The question arises: who is the actual perpetrator, and who will profit? A peculiar battle for “who-dunnit” ensues, in this case the irony being it is less about law enforcement finding the culprit and more about thieves trying to one up each other for “street cred”. A “he said / she said” given the absence of a confirming third party. As my uncle always said, “Always steal from a thief”.

Practically, based on what we know now, my money would be on MajorNelson as the real attacker, they’ve shown better receipts, as it were. Sony, meanwhile, is still in the process of investigating the reported breach.

While nothing released so far includes personal user information, as a precaution, if you’ve got personal info on any of Sony’s services – e.g. Playstation Plus etc… changing accounts / passwords is probably a good idea. But as of now, this doesn’t seem to rise to the level of the 2011 PSN hack that compromised PII of over 70 million users.