Facebook Hires Infamous Sony PlayStation Hacker

Facebook has hired George Hotz, best known as the person who jailbroke and reverse engineered Sony's PlayStation 3, sparking a legal battle, according to ReadWriteWeb, which covers the tech industry.

Hotz, also a skilled iPhone hacker, settled with Sony in April for cracking the PlayStation 3 code, allowing third-party software to be installed on it.

Sony claimed that Hotz had violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the Computer Fraud Abuse Act and that users would be enabled to play pirated video games.

As part of the settlement, Hotz – known as GeoHot the Web -- agreed not to publish any more code.

But the lawsuit apparently angered hackers, which led to the PlayStation Network later being hacked and millions of PSN users’ payment information being compromised.

PSN was down for more than three weeks after the security breach, and the incident cost Sony $24 million when all was said and done.

Incidentally, Sony's movie studio is responsible for The Social Network, the movie about Facebook that presented an unflattering portrait of co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook confirmed the news of Hotz’s hiring Monday to ReadWriteWeb.