Slideshow

Sony helped create the home entertainment industry by successfully
defending the right of its customers to copy movies for personal use
(with the help of its Betamax technology, of course) all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. That made the debacle of the company’s decision, two
decades later, to embed a stealth software “rootkit” to prevent
customers from making unauthorized copies of its music CDs all the more
poignant.

Put together a list of Sony’s missteps, and one theme comes to the fore:
“control.” Indeed, the company that proved so adept at anticipating the
needs of consumers (and producing products to match), has stumbled the
worst when it tries to dictate, rather than listen. That was the case
with Sony’s infamous “NGO Strategy” controversy, in which an internal
memo detailing company efforts to spy on environmental activists was
leaked to the press. The document included the names of activist groups
pushing for regulations Sony executives considered harmful.

For a company that almost single-handedly created the
consumer electronics industry with blockbusters like the Walkman, Sony has had
its share of strategic and public relations face plants in the last decade, with IT security being just one
flash point. From its infamous digital rights management rootkit to flaming
laptop batteries to the latest breaches of PlayStation Network and Station.com,
here are some of Sony’s biggest security woes.

Its doubtful that executives at Sony thought too much (if at
all) about their decision to rescind an obscure feature dubbed “OtherOS” that
had been added to the PlayStation 3 System Software soon after its launch. The
feature allowed other operating systems, specifically Linux, to be run on the
device, allowing users to play games from the PS3 console and use it as a home
computer with a compatible USB keyboard, mouse and VGA adapter.

Just two years after its first recall, Sony found itself in
hot water with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) for yet
another batch of laptop batteries that were overheating. A separate issue than
the one that prompted the massive 2006 recall, the 2008 incident affected
around 100,000 notebook battery packs that used Sony’s 2.15Ah lithium ion
cells. The fault was linked batteries sold in 2004 and 2005 and linked to
around 40 overheating incidents.

This was just the first in what would prove to be a string
of embarrassments to the Japanese firm over the manufacture of laptop
batteries. It began with reports in both Japan and the U.S. about
Sony-manufactured lithium ion batteries that were overheating and, in some
cases, bursting into flames. The company ultimately recalled and replaced
millions of the defective batteries which were used by laptop manufacturers
like Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Sony and Toshiba.

The takedown of the Mariposa botnet is an example of both the possibilities and complications facing law enforcement around the world as they work to stamp out botnets. A cyberlaw enforcement success story, the take down of Mariposa by Spanish authorities in December, 2009, followed months of work analyzing the botnet, which numbered close to 13 million infected computers at its height and generated €20,000 a month in revenues.