Police Raid PS3 Hacker's Home, Hacker Retaliates, Sony Sues

Sony is pretty annoyed with those hooligans hacking its beloved PlayStation 3. So annoyed, in fact, that they’ve involved law enforcement: On February 23, PS3 and Linux hacker graf_chokolo said the local police and a Sony representative raided his house.

There’s not a lot of information on what, exactly, went down, as all we have to go on at the moment is a comment graf_chokolo left on his blog, PS3 Linux and Hypervisor Reverse Engineering Blog:

“Guys, SONY was today at my home with police and got all my stuff and accounts. So be careful from now on.”

Sony–who is doing everything it can to keep hackers out of its PS3, including working on a “hack-proof” system–underestimated the abilities of a hacker scorned. Graf, real name Alexander Egorenkov, responded to the raid by uploading his databases to the Internet, and encouraging people to “upload it everywhere” so that Sony wouldn’t be able to easily remove it.

Of course, Sony responded to that little shenanigan with a much bigger threat: a legal notice from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) lawyers demanding that he remove the links and, oh yeah, pay a sum of one million euros. Yeah, you read that right. Graf left another comment on his blog explaining the situation (after he removed the links to comply with the SCEE notice).

I’m not going to choose sides, but I think that it’s perhaps time for Sony to try another method. This whole alpha-dog scare tactic method isn’t really working out for them.

As PS3Crunch mentions, maybe Sony should just hire these hackers, instead of pissing them off?

[graf_chokolo via Tom’s Guide]

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