It could be. Anonymous is stating that they have nothing to do with it, though it could be a more radical offshoot of them.[1]

It could be some massive hardware problem, and they are taking advantage of the ill-will related to geohot to say that it's not their fault, even though it could be.

[1] http://www.anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=848

I've heard - though nothing more substantial than rumor, it seems like it could be true - that some pirates had modified their PS3s to sign in to PSN dev channels, and then hacked the dev channels to pirate games via direct download from PSN. Although not directly related, some of that would have been facilitated by GeoHot's publishing of the signing keys for PS3 binaries.

I have seen tutorials about that method in several forums. People were adding funds to their account for free and downloading tons of paid content. That's plain stealing, and I'm happy that Sony may be fixing that.

Would Sony really take down the whole network just to stop some pirates? Maybe the dev network has access to more juicy stuff (e.g. CC data)?

Given the use of a static 'random' variable, who knows what other kinds of trusts were hidden behind simple obfuscation?

Source?

This isn't a source, but I did hear the same sort of thing mentioned here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2476931

It doesn't look like planned downtime to me, so I don't see how it could be directly related.

But that doesn't mean that someone hasn't blown PSN's security wide open after figuring something out on a hacked PS3, or something like that. I get the feeling that Sony doesn't plan to tell us, either.

Once again, I'm glad that I haven't bought any Sony products for ages.

Yes and no.

Yes because they believe it was "Anonymous" who hacked the system, as a retaliation to "the geohotz thing" and no because it could very well be something entirely separate.

All we know is they had an intruder, have switched off the network and are now rebuilding.

From the amount of money they certainly lose while the service is down we can infer that the intrusion looks pretty deep from their perspective.