A subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has been accused of enlisting the help of a computer hacker to bring down a rival company.
The BBC’s Panorama program says News Corp’s security arm NDS recruited a hacker to acquire the smart card codes of ITV’s ONdigital, the biggest UK pay TV rival to News Corp’s Sky TV.
The BBC says the codes were then posted online, allowing pirates to access ITV’s digital services for free.
ONdigital went bust in 2002, just four years after it had been set up as a rival to Sky.
The allegations centre on pay TV smart cards – cards with a microchip which pay TV subscribers insert into a set top box to unscramble pay TV signals.
When a smart card is pirated, it can cost the pay TV operator hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Panorama alleged that two former senior Scotland Yard officers, Ray Adams and Len Withall, who worked for NDS, recruited a hacker.
Hacker Lee Gibling told the program he was encouraged to expand his piracy website, The House of Ill Compute (THOIC).
“It was NDS, it was their baby and it started to become more their baby as they fashioned it to their own design,” he said.
With that NDS controlled the biggest pirate website in the world, and Panorama alleges it used it to recruit one of the best hackers in the world.
A young German, Oliver Kömmerling, had hacked into Sky’s latest smart card.
He said Mr Adams from NDS paid him a visit.
“Adams made me a proposition and he looked at me and said could you imagine working for us? This was really after half an hour,” he said.
“And I said to him, in principle ‘yes’, but what do you really want, I mean, what does that mean, what I have to do?”
The program goes onto to detail how Mr Kömmerling unlocked the secrets of ITV’s smart cards.
‘Flogged until it broke’
But the codes were then allegedly published on THOIC’s website, unlocking programming for ONdigital.
“We sent them out update codes, we wanted people to be able to update these cards themselves, we didn’t want them buying a single card and then finding they couldn’t get the channels,” Mr Gibling said.
“We wanted them to stay and keep with ONdigital, flogging it until it broke.”
The company’s former chief technical officer, Simon Dore, says this spelt ONdigital’s downfall in 2002.
“The real killer, the hole beneath the waterline was the piracy – we couldn’t recover from that,” he said.
The downfall cost the operator’s shareholders more than a billion pounds and 1,500 employees lost their jobs.
Panorama secretly filmed Mr Adams denying any knowledge of these codes.
“I never ever had the ONdigital codes, I never touched an ONdigital card, ever once.
I’ve never seen an ONdigital pirate card.
I’ve never had any codes,” he said.
But Panorama says internal emails suggest otherwise.
NDS denies that it used the THOIC website to sabotage the commercial interests of ONdigital, or any other rival.
It says it recruited hackers to track and catch hackers and pirates.
But similar allegations of corporate espionage are being levelled against News Corporation in other parts of the world, including Italy.
In a statement, News Corporation said it was proud to have supported NDS in its “aggressive fight against piracy and copyright infringement”.Â
“The BBC did not pose questions to News Corporation ahead of broadcast and was unwilling to engage in any conversation on this issue, which is disappointing,” the statement added.
Article source: http://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/news-corp-accused-hacking-rival-225220412.html
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