News Corp. Hires World’s Second Best Hacker for Corporate Espionage
News Corp, the media conglomerate that’s parent to a number of New and Old Media properties including the Wall Street Journal, MySpace and Fox News Channel, may be subject to a stunning billion dollar civil judgement against them soon, based on the testimony of a hacker described by the Dish Network’s attorney Chad Hagan as one of the “two best hackers in the world.”
The hacker in question, Christopher Tarnovsky, was allegedly hired by a subsidiary of News Corp to develop ‘pirating software’ designed to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television source, according to a Reuters report over at Breitbart today. Tarnovsky says that he was paid in cash (the first payment was $20k), and payment was hidden inside electronic devices mailed from a Canadian location.
Tarnovsky also stated that the payments were made from a separate News Corp subsidiary, Harper Collins. NDS denies the allegation by Dish lawyers that the idea was to flood the market with millions of hacked satellite cards that allowed users to gain free access to programming, and that rather they had Tarnovsky under their employ to simply reverse engineer the products of their competitors for eductational purposes.
The $900 million dollar suit against Tarnovsky and NDS is expected to last another two or three weeks - it’ll be very interesting to see how this all shakes out.
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