Quote Originally Posted by zanzabar View Post
amazon was shown to have easy access to cpu time for brute force decryption but i dont see how this is anything more than a proxy as it was not a brute force attack. and the sony attack was supposed to be an inside job from the data center so i dont see how this is related other than being japanese companies in the normal get your data stolen and send out mass emails about it.
+1


I actually have first-hand experience with Sony's network from a global perspective, and I can say with confidence that this attack was not carried out by "sophisticated" people... or if it was they went out of their way to make their job unnecessarily complicated. Without even sitting down to really mull it over I'm pretty sure I can come up with at least a dozen ways to severely cripple their network or steal data from it.

Doubly so now that they recently (in the last 18 months) brought all of their equipment in-house, as opposed to having outside companies handle most of it... training and experience takes time to build and has undoubtedly left them more vulnerable over the transition period.

So yeah, take it from someone with first hand experience in their environment... this was surely not a difficult accomplishment at all. Unless the "hackers" had no idea what they were doing and tried breaking in through the worst possible vector.