Sony sites suffering as reports circulate of further hacking

Loose hacker collective Anonymous has continued to claim responsibility for Sony's websites suffering denial of service attacks, and has allegedly stepped up actions against individual Sony employees.

Yesterday, a press release was issued on a website which claimed to be a mission statement from members of Anonymous, declaring open conflict with Sony over the company's legal wrangle with jailbreak hacker Geohot. That statement outlined a plan to engage in a campaign of hacking and electronic disruption against the publisher.

That campaign would appear to have had some degree of efficacy, as at the time of writing, Sony's PlayStation blog was unobtainable and the company's main sites were struggling to load.

Reports have also filtered in of the PlayStation Network spending periods being unavailable. On various message boards and chat channels people claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous have claimed responsibility for participating in the actions which have resulted in these outages.

Sony, however, has tweeted to announce that PSN will be "undergoing sporadic maintenance" throughout the day, and could be unavailable.

More seriously, PlayStation Lifestyle has reported that Anonymous affiliates are engaging in more personal attacks on Sony staff members, even attempting to obtain the details of Howard Stringer's children in order to pursue nuisance campaigns against them.

The perpetrators of these attacks, which gather information such as contact details and addresses for purposes of fraud, are purportedly part of a separate group of hackers who have begun a campaign known as Sony Recon, unsatisfied with the level of action being pursued elsewhere.

Sony has been contacted for a response to the allegations.