George HotzIt was Sony’s lawsuit against George Hotz that prompted hacker group Anonymous to wage war on Sony earlier this month. Anonymous might very well not have anything to do with the theft of PSN users’ personal information — it denies any involvement — but Sony’s litigiousness may have been what prompted the infiltration by hackers. If you thought there was any chance Hotz was somehow involved, think again.

“To anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I’m not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door,” he wrote on his blog earlier today. “Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone elses server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at d****es like Sony.”

Hotz, who was partially responsible for uncovering the PlayStation 3’s root key earlier this year, asked that people not blame the engineers responsible for PSN’s security but the executives who decided to draw the attention of the hacking community. “Also, let’s not fault the Sony engineers for this, the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the BMG rootkit,” Hotz said. “The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea.”

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