I wonder whether the attackers used a gift card or a stolen card to establish EC2 services? If Amazon still allows the use of gift cards for EC2, they might want to re-think that policy. In any event, it's another (albeit small) black eye for their web services.

Quote Originally Posted by Serra View Post
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.
Wow. If a network with tens of millions of users run by one of the largest corporations in the world can be brought down by unsophisticated criminals, it kinda makes you wonder how many others are vulnerable. And surprise, Sony has a very different opinion of their attackers abilities. From the Bloomberg article:
The incursion, which compromised the personal accounts of more than 100 million Sony customers, was “a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack,” Sony has said.


Looks like judging the sophistication of this attack is a matter of one's perspective and level of knowledge in these matters. Unlike a lot of folks here, I barely know enough to setup/run my home's LAN. So, I'll judge the level of sophistication of Sony's attackers by the amount of time it takes for them to get caught. Caught tomorrow...unsophisticated. Caught never...pretty damn sophisticated. I guess time will tell.