A Diamond Model Perspective on the 2011 “Operation Sony” Cyberattack

Between April 4th – April 7th, 2011, millions of users were unable to access select Sony websites following a cyberbreach referred to as “Operation Sony” (Greenberg, 2011). The following websites were affected: Sony.com, Sonycareers.com and PlayStation.com (Greenberg, 2011). Hackers from the notorious hacktivist group “Anonymous” exploited multiple vulnerabilities within Sony’s network infrastructure and launched a distributed denial of service attack (Benedetti, 2011). Despite only being considered a “lower to medium strength” attack (Anderson, 2011), Sony suffered reputational damage and was heavily criticized for possessing outdated and vulnerable software within their servers.

Sony became aware of the cyberattack on April 4th, 2011 after discovering certain web applications (Sony.com, Sonycareers.com, Playstation.com) were flooded with an unusually high number of HTTP requests (Wagenseil, 2011). This disrupted each of the website’s services and caused them to momentarily disappear from the internet (Wagensil, 2011). Following complaints from users and extensive media coverage, Sony released a statement the following day stating:

"We are currently investigating, including the possibility of targeted behavior of an outside party. If this is indeed caused by such act, we want to once again thank our customers who have borne the brunt of the attack through interrupted service. Our engineers are working to restore and maintain the services, and we appreciate our customers' continued support." (Benedetti, 2011)

Sony’s security engineering team worked nonstop to blacklist malicious IP addresses in groups, even reaching out to DDoS mitigation service Prolexic to conduct reconnaissance and minimize incoming traffic (Anderson, 2011). After three days of persistent service disruption, the perpetrators announced that they’d cease their efforts and not exploit PlayStation Network as they did not want to harm innocent users (Reilly, 2011). By April 12th, 2011, all websites were restored and fully functional (Wagenseil, 2011).

The Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis will be used to structurally break down the 2011 Sony Breach. Upon reading this, you may be asking yourself “what is this diamond model?” 

The Diamond Model is a critical cybersecurity framework that assists organizations with the analysis of cyber attacks. It simplifies the complexities of an attack by breaking it down into four core features: adversary, capability, victim, and infrastructure. 

So what actually happened here?

Well, instead of answering the “what,” we need to first unpack the “who” for this scenario. The adversary responsible for this attack is international hacktivist group Anonymous (Benedetti, 2011). Anonymous is a decentralized hacktivist group consisting of skilled threat actors who have the financial means and expertise to enforce DDoS attacks, disrupt network activity and showcase censored images/messages (Gabriella Coleman, 2023).

Their roots can be traced back to 2003 when ideas pertaining to radical political ideology circulated amongst like minded users on the anonymous imageboard website known as 4chan (Gabriella Coleman, 2023). In the years to follow, they launched targeted cyberattacks towards government entities and media conglomerates. One example of this was 2008’s “Project Chanology” in which the Church of Scientology fell victim to a plethora of prank calls, DDoS attacks, and confidential document leakage (Gabriella Coleman, 2023). 

Sony first emerged on Anonymous’s radar following the former’s legal action undertaken against George Hotz, a prominent individual in the hacker community (Tao, 2011). Hotz had published sensitive information pertaining to security flaws/vulnerabilities within the PlayStation 3’s infrastructure (Garcia, 2011). Following this act of cyberespionage, Sony retaliated by filing a lawsuit against Hotz alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and copyright infringement (Tao, 2011). This component can be identified as the foundation of the Social-Political Meta-Feature. On April 2nd, 2011, Anonymous voiced their displeasure pertaining Sony’s legal actions against Hotz (Reilly, 2011). They released a statement in the form of a press release containing this key sentence: 

“Your recent legal actions against fellow internet citizens, GeoHot...have been deemed an unforgivable offense against free speech and internet freedom” (Reilly, 2011). It’s evident that Anonymous was motivated by the legal battle initiated by Sony as they believed this was a monumental abuse against the judicial system and a prime example of corporate greed. 

Additionally, the adversary-victim relationship can be characterized as Anonymous’s intent to seek revenge against Sony for Hotz publishing a method enabling the console to reveal secret cryptographic keys on social media in January 2011 (Fildes, 2011). Sony’s failure to establish accountability for the PlayStation 3 vulnerabilities was a unique circumstance that can also be attributed to Anonymous’s intent for the revenge-fueled act of hacktivism.

Shortly after Anonymous released the statement, they acted upon their threat by launching a calculated distributed denial-of-service attack on several of Sony’s websites (Greenberg, 2011). Sony.com, the PlayStation blog, and PlayStation.com all temporarily went offline (Greenberg, 2011). While Anonymous is composed of extremely capable black-hat hackers, the attack itself was considered as “less sophisticated” compared to their previous excursions (Anderson, 2011). Regarding the capability, Anonymous utilized the open-source Low Orbit Ion Cannon tool to launch the DDoS attack (Morris, 2011). 

The LOIC was originally developed as a network stress testing application, however, it is now used to commonly launch DOS attacks (Beschokov, 2011). It allows hackers to command the duration and rate of the attack if they specify the IP address and URL of the target (Beschokov, 2011). The LOIC can overwhelm the target with either TCP, UDP, and HTTP requests (Cloudflare, 2011). From an infrastructure standpoint, it can be concluded that dozens of anomalous HTTP requests (presented as malformed GET requests) and network packets from different IP addresses were executed and sent to Sony’s web applications. The HTTP requests “msg” fields were manually set by the attackers (Morris, 2011). Consequently, Sony’s security teams couldn’t IP blacklist the malicious requests due to the sheer volume. 

It can’t be emphasized enough how easily the LOIC can be weaponized. Supporting research states, “What makes LOIC particularly concerning is its simplicity and accessibility—users with little to no technical expertise can deploy it, often as part of coordinated DDoS attacks led by larger groups,” (Vercara, 2011). The LOIC incorporated the Domain Name System to determine the command-and-control point (Cloudflare, 2011). Most local firewalls can usually mitigate these attacks by incorporating IP filtering and limiting the maximum number of requests permissible from a single IP address (Morris, 2011). However, several industry experts stated that Sony used unpatched versions of the open-source Apache Web Server Software lacking a firewall (Wagenseil, 2011). Supplemental sources have also confirmed that Anonymous utilized voluntary botnets through an Internet Relay Chat server to expedite the attack (Chace, 2011).

In this instance, hackers were able to integrate IRC chat channels to run a “hivemind” version of the LOIC (Emspak, 2011). This is when one user was able to control several networked computers through a specific IRC channel (Emspak, 2011). The bot controller communicates with the bots and instructs it to run commands (Chace, 2011). 

The exploitation was carried out by enablement of such commands, allowing the botnets to automatically send messages back to the IRC, and report the results afterwards (Chace, 2011). Anonymous’s decision to simultaneously combine both the LOIC to send fraudulent HTTP requests and voluntary botnets overwhelmed the victim’s network infrastructure and disrupted service within Sony.com and Playstation.com (Emspak, 2011). These processes can logically summarize the relationship between the infrastructure (LOIC) and capabilities (voluntary botnets, DNS, HTTP requests) that the adversary employed to successfully carry out this DDoS attack. 

While DDoS attacks are still prevalent within cyberspace, their effects don’t have to be devastating. However, Operation Sony exposed a multitude of unacceptable technical failures from Sony’s end. The Diamond Model can showcase that future incidents can be prevented if organizations can establish a culture promoting transparency and accountability for their security posture.