Sony has had yet another security breach of its Playstation and Qriocity network.

Who's looking after security at Sony? Did they hire the guy who used to try and keep Jim Sweeney and Steve Steen out the studios at the start of CB TV?

You'll have been worrying if Gordon's column today is the genuine thing, or if LulzSec still has control of the Sun website.

There's a bunch of made-up stories all over the Bizarre page, and a bunch of stuff that wouldn't appear in a proper newspaper. So, hard to tell.

But hang on, what's this?

NOEL Gallagher's first hurdle as a solo artist will be having to face Coldplay in a battle of the albums.

The guitarist will have a job on his hands to stay at the top of the charts for more than one week this autumn.

Chris Martin and the band are releasing their latest offering seven days later.

A facile "chart battle" story about two records that aren't even being released on the same day? With Noel Gallagher involved?

This Gordon Smart column passes Some Sort Of Turing Test.

Sony are trying to link Anonymous - the loose internet affiliation, not Joe Klein - for the lifting of thousand upon thousand of pieces of personal information.

It doesn't seem to have said sorry for its weak security, mind you.

Although trying to suggest a link between the security breach and an apparent Anonymous Denial Of Service attack, Sony mumbles that it might have been a coincidence:

The attack that stole the personal data of millions of Sony customers was launched separately, while the company was distracted protecting itself against the denial of service campaign, Sony said.

Sony said it was not sure whether the organizers of the two attacks were working together.

What's really interesting is the complete lack of haste that Sony brought to the loss of all this information:

The company noticed unauthorized activity on its network on April 19, and discovered that data had been transferred off the network the next day.

"Hey... you know all that unauthorized activity yesterday? D'you reckon that we should check to see what happened?"
"oh, yes. How about 3pm tomorrow?"
"I've got a meeting with Frank then. Can we make it half four?"

Still, once they realised there had been personal details taken, they swung into action, right?

The company also said it waited two days after discovering data was stolen from its PlayStation video game network before contacting law enforcement and did not meet with FBI officials until five days later.

It's funny: if Sony get a hint of someone putting a unlicensed song on YouTube, it's takedown machine swings into action straight away. Someone walks off with people's personal data, and it's nearly a full week before the FBI are brought in.

Perhaps you should ask Sony to hide your credit card details in a Kings Of Leon single. It looks like they'd get better protection then.

What would you do if you had the contact details of quarter of a million Americans who can't really sing as well as they think they can?

SyCo's servers have been hacked, and details of a quarter million US X Factor entrants have been copied.

The producers have sent out a warning email:

‘This week, we learned that computer hackers illegally accessed information you and others submitted to us to receive information about The X Factor auditions.

It is possible that the information you did provide to us, which included your name, email address, zip code, phone number (which was optional), date of birth, and gender, may have been accessed.

We are taking this matter very seriously and are working with federal law enforcement authorities to investigate this illegal action.

The X Factor will never ask you to email personal information such as financial data, credit card numbers, Social Security numbers or the user name or passwords you use to access other websites.

If you receive an email that appears to be from Fox.com or The X Factor asking for personal information, please delete it, as it did not come from us.’

Some contestants on Cowell's programmes have a tough time of it once they're on screen, with not very much care shown towards them. Who knew the twist for the X Factor's US launch would be you'd get poorly treated and exposed to christ-knows-what even before you audition?

According to Websense, the 6Music and 1Xtra websites have somehow become injected with malicious code:

The injected iframe occurs at the foot of the BBC 6 Music Web page, and loads code from a Web site in the .co.cc TLD. The iFrame injected into the Radio 1Xtra Web page leads to the same malicious site.

If an unprotected user browsed to the site they would be faced with drive-by downloads, meaning that simply browsing to the page is enough to get infected with a malicious executable.

The payload is delivered to the end user only once, with the initial visit being logged by the malware authors.

The code that is delivered to end users utilizes exploits delivered by the Phoenix exploit kit. A malicious binary is ultimately delivered to the end user. The VirusTotal detection of this file is currently around 20%.

I think the takeaway message from this is: it could happen to anyone. Do take care online.

Der Spiegel has the story of Deniz A and Christian M, two young hackers from Germany who have been vexing Sony and others by - allegedly - taking materials off the hard-drives of record company staff and pop stars and selling it on.

It's quite a sad story, because it seems like the motivation isn't malicious or greedy. There are demands for money, and blackmail, but it's all so poorly thought-out as to be heartbreaking:

In April, Deniz hacked into the computer of Jason Clarkson, the brother of American singer Kelly Clarkson. Using his computer, he managed to infiltrate the pop star's laptop and downloaded 19 new songs from the hard drive. He would have preferred Lady Gaga, he later told the police, but he couldn't get into her computer. Nevertheless, Kelly Clarkson wasn't half bad, he added. Soon afterwards, he sent an e-mail to a woman from the German Kelly Clarkson fan club, asking if she was interested in buying the next album -- the whole thing. The woman notified the star's management, negotiated a price with DJ Stolen and eventually got all the songs from him for €250. She also kept a copy of the entire chat.

I suppose it's something of a surprise to see that anyone has found a way to make serious money out of selling music online.

More seriously, if you're ripping off Kelly Clarkson, who would think the best place to start would be her biggest fan?

The use of apparently "embarrassing" photos of Ke$ha taken from her laptop to get her to record "drops" is less amusing, but reads like the actions of someone who doesn't realise the gravity of what he's doing. It doesn't make it right, but given the material is meant to be of a career-destroying degree, the demands Deniz made seem pretty small.

The real question the story raises is while the police concentrate on hobbyists who leave their digital fingerprints over their unseasoned attempts at extortion, what are the more experienced hackers getting away with?

[Thanks to Michael M for the link]

Whoever hacked into Kanye West's accounts did a nice job, planting a public seed that West was, well, willing to plant a public seed:

“I know that people will find this as another thing to hate on, but f--- it. I’m open to doing porn. Hell, I’ll even do bisexual scenes - myself, another man, and a woman, or just me and two women. I know people will find that as some weird sh--, but I am who I am.”

Of course, there wasn't a word of truth in it. Well, probably. The real Kanye popped up - sorry, ill-advised choice of phrase - and put everyone straight:

"Yoooo, why won't you let me be great!!!" West wrote. "I had the two greatest days of my life, and when I get back from the Louie [sic] show, I read some sh-- claiming I said I'm down to do porn and some bisexual porn!!!! I can't believe the AVN [Adult Video News] would post [that story]."

He seems especially upset that he was supposedly going to do bisexual porn, doesn't he?

Assuming, of course, that this message was the real Kanye. There are a lot of impersonators - haters, if you will; impersonhaters, presumably - pretending to be Kanye:

"First people believed the Twitter/ Stephen Colbert thing, Rolling Stone even printed it!!!!" he said. "Now somebody has been hacking into my MySpace and somebody's actually hacked into my personal GMail account and has been e-mailing people from it. ... Hey, world, I no longer have GMail! I found out I had twelve unauthorized Skype accounts under my name!!! This [is] all in the past four days. Welcome to Kanye West World!"

Surely, though, someone as supposedly cool as Kanye wouldn't start a message with something so cringe-inducing as "why won't you let me be great", or sprinkle his public utterances with so many exclamation marks he makes himself read like a twelve year-old. The only logical explanation is that there is no real Kanye West any more.

Someone has hacked into the Twitter account where Britney Spear's people pretend to be Britney Spears, and pretended to be Britney Spears:

“HI Yall! Brit Brit here, just wanted to update you all on the size of my vagina. Its about 4 feet wide with razor sharp teeth.”

The team apparently knew this was a fake straight away - probably the correct spelling was a clue; the message has since been removed.

For some reason, "experts" have decided this hackage was probably done by the same person who hacked Barack Obama's account - presumably because that time the message read "It's Barack here, my vagina is four feet wide with razor sharp teeth."

It's a couple of years since the RIAA website was last subjected to attacks from disgruntled filesharers; we'd assumed it had sorted out its security settings.



Apparently not. There's some speculation over on Torrent Freak as to what has exactly happened.