By Michael Collins, COTO Report
Ray Adams is a name you will hear more frequently as the latest and perhaps most fatal Murdoch – News Corp. scandal emerges.
When Murdoch was setting up his BSKYB cable network in England, he had some serious competition. ITV had a digital service called ITV Digital. The British broadcaster was prepared to go head to head with Murdoch’s network. As the services rolled out, ITV Digital became subject to furious hacker attacks. The hackers broke the ITV encryption code and distributed it widely allowing so many people to get free ITV service, the venture failed, largely due to the piracy of its service, and Murdoch had a clean road to mega profits with BSKYB.
The BBC’s Panorama television show broke a story (not yet available in the United States) accusing a Murdoch owned firm, NDS, of hiring hackers to break the ITV code, thus sabotaging the Murdoch competitor. The rest is history and huge profits. BSKYB is the dominant British cable network. It’s spreading throughout Europe.
During the time ITV was hacked out of existence, Ray Adams was the head of operational security for NDS. The firm hired hackers to anticipate and check security problems with its own encryption system. But there’s more. Reports from Great Britain and Australia document NDS using hackers to target rivals. Australia’s Financial Review just broke a well document story outlining the same pattern of hacking behavior by NDS in behalf of Murdoch cable operations there. The publication documented the story with 10,000 emails it received from, you guessed it, the computer of Ray Adams.
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