In its ongoing quest to neutralize the alleged hackers who decimated the PS3’s security, Sony won the legal right to track down the IP address of anyone who visited a site on which the PS3 jailbreak was posted.

Wired reports a federal magistrate ruled that Sony can access the info for any visitor to the site of the accused hacker since January 2009.

Sony accuses a New Jersey-based man of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and committing other crimes by posting software tools and an encryption key that let PS3 players manipulate their systems. Users who jailbreak their PS3s can potentially play unlicensed and pirated games.

Sony says it needs the visitors’ info to show how widely the hack was distributed, as well as prove that enough San Francisco users accessed the hack to justify Sony suing the accused hacker there rather than in New Jersey.

Judge Lets Sony Unmask Visitors to PS3-Jailbreaking Site [Wired]

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