Disclaimer: As an IT professional, I am here to to contribute my opinions on the flack that 'jailbreakers' and 'hackers' are receiving for the recent Sony outage. While these people need no defense, the ignorance from those pointing the fingers is staggering and outrageous. Therefore, I'm saying a few words to correct that perspective, though admittedly you can't fix stupid.
First off to disclose a little bit of my personal background. I am an IT consultant for a company known to most fans of the Price is Right as Liberty Medical supply, a subsidiary of Medco Health Solutions.
While I have no claim to fame in the same sense as Geohot, I do much the same thing for the company I work for, i.e. ethical hacking. I spend a great deal of time pouring over source code on a daily basis in an effort to improve the stability, performance, and security of the apps our company uses to do business everyday.
Part of my job is to break applications and discover potential exploits, to maintain the security of our patients data, which is crucial to the profitability of our business. Without people like me working for the company, working day in and out to strengthen our security, we would be risking our integrity and reputation, which is a trust with the patients that buy diabetic supplies from us everyday.
Some of you think that Geohot and the many other 'jailbreakers' out there are to blame for the atrocity at Sony right now. Some of you believe that their actions inspired the behavior of unethical hackers to steal personal information of users of Sony's service, of which I am a PSN member; however, given the disclosure above, those feelings are misdirected at a group of people that do wonderful things everyday.
Let's squash that right now. Geohot is not responsible for and should not claim responsibility for the actions of the people responsible for Sony's network shutdown. Plain and simple, Geohot and I are of the same opinion, the understanding of how hardware and software work is crucial to improving the performance and capabilities of those platforms. Often this means reverse engineering products in order to exploit them. In this sense, we are hackers, and I am quite proud of that.
When Sony states that they hired a security consultant firm to help strengthen their network, they mean they are hiring people like Geohot, I, and many others - hackers. How does security evolve without those of us that take interest in understanding how software works? Anyone who's of the opinion that it comes from people like us, who find these exploits, have the correct perspective.
Sony, plain and simple, is to blame for the 77 million compromised accounts (once again one of those accounts are mine.) Their cavalier approach to security, their haughty claims, and their inability to recognize their own security flaws are the reason that mine and your personal data is in the hands of a group of unethical bastards who lack regard for yours and my privacy. As Geohot stated, instead of throwing lawyers at the 'problem' they could have been investing in ethical hackers to improve the security of PSN, If Sony were my company, Geohot would have had a job for the impressive discovery he and FailOverflow made.
I can only imagine if the company I worked for had an anti hacker attitude. Protected health information would be at great risk, possibly exploited, and our company would be paying millions of dollars in HIPPA violations rather than to the salaries of the 1000's of people that are employed by our company.
I can't say that I agree with Geohot's immature behavior during the law suit (Anti-Sony rap was kind of lame), but I do agree with his principles and overall belief in hacking. Without it, your personal data would be much less secure than it is now. Sony is proof of what happens when the finger is pointed in the wrong direction rather than reacting pro-actively to potential threats.
I could go on about our rights as consumers to actually own the products that we buy and how Sony is unethical in the respect that they removed advertised features from their product, when some of us bought it for exactly that feature. I could go on about the many of those that are unjustifiably angry at Geohot when there is no proof that the exploit he discovered was even used in the attacks against PSN, but that's not what I want to highlight in this discussion.
What I want to emphasize here is that those of you who are condemning hacking as an evil don't respect the necessity for this art. Does anyone of you order your diabetic supplies from the company I work for? I gaurantee you, because of my efforts, and the many people I work with everyday, your social security number, your insurance information, and any other protected health information is always moved on secure channels and is never intercepted by those who might exploit your identity for their own personal gain. Sony, can't say the same!
While Geohot and many others like him, do what they do for slightly different reasons, whether it be for consumer rights, the joy of breaking the restrictions and limitations of a new smart phone, or to protect your privacy, we all have a common ethical boundary we do not cross. We don't aim to steal what is not ours, we aim to protect what is ours, whether its our rights as a consumer or the integrity of the company that pays our bills. I am a hacker and I am proud of what I do! If anyones eyes have failed to open, well as I said, you can't fix stupid.
