Infamous hacker group Anonymous left a message for the outraged users of Sony's PlayStation Network earlier this week, denying that it orchestrated the attack that took it offline for three weeks and counting. The audio-only message was generated using text-to-speech software and posted as a video file on YouTube. You can find it linked from this blog entry at AnonOps.blogspot.com.

In it, Anonymous said that it "does not condone credit card theft," and accused Sony of taking advantage of the groups' previous ill will toward the company to "distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company's servers."  However, the group conceded that some members may have acted on their own. For this, "AnonOps was not related to this incident and does not take responsibility for whatever has happened." the message says.

The situation outlined above is possible due to the loosely distributed structure of the Anonymous group--anyone with a computer can join. As evidenced by the message, it is also clear that there are leaders within the group that designate targets to attack, and also to defend the group against specific allegations.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Network world
- check out this article at CNET News

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