Just in case you really don't know, the various branches of Sony have demonstrated technological contempt for [their] customers for years. I'll omit their insistence on promoting their own products over other standards and general push for increased DRM, such as Minidisc/ATRAC, Blu-ray, etc. and focus on their actual attacks.

It started with the CD root kit fiasco, in which music CDs distributed by Sony infected Windows PCs with software designed to prevent the ripping of music CDs to the computer, which also contained exploitable holes used by malware to infect computers.

Sony then removed the Other OS (e.g. Linux) feature from the new version of its PS3 consoles. This wasn't too egregious, but next they retroactively removed Other OS from older consoles that originally supported it. That upset a lot of people.

Along came GeoHot, a reverse engineer determined to get Other OS back, and no doubt other less-outspoken hackers. So he and the others did, and along with it recovered Sony's private key used to sign PS3 software, allowing Linux to access all the hardware of the PS3, as well as running other homebrew software.

Less-scrupulous individuals, not including GeoHot himself, used the aforementioned work to run pirated software on the PS3. This upset Sony.

The straw that broke the camel's back, though, was Sony suing GeoHot into oblivion (I personally suspect they also astroturfed gaming sites to get GeoHot's hack associated with cheaters at Call of Duty, which it was not). This is the final event that triggered the misguided but potent onslaught of attacks against any and all Sony properties.

References:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/PlayStation_3...

[Edit: fixed botched pronoun after partial sentence rewrite]