Kate Middleton's phone hacked - report

Rupert Murdoch's News International media group is again being accused of illegally obtaining information on people.A British lawmaker accuses News International of more hacking of royals and politiciansRupert Murdoch's media group rejects the allegationsBritish media name Tony Blair and Kate Middleton as possible victimsLondon's Metropolitan Police confirm they are considering allegations they have received

London (CNN) -- A powerful British media group is fighting new accusations that it illegally got information on members of the royal family and top politicians, after a lawmaker accused it of hacking.

Police have information that "strongly suggests" that a private investigator targeted royals, lawmakers and high-level terrorist informers on behalf of Rupert Murdoch's News International, Labour lawmaker Tom Watson said in Parliament Wednesday.

British media said the targets included former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Kate Middleton when she was dating Prince William, the second in line to the throne. They married in April.

Buckingham Palace and Prince William's office at Clarence House both declined to comment.

But London's Metropolitan Police told CNN Thursday it "has received a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy.... These allegations are currently being considered."

News International rejected the accusation.

"With regards to Tom Watson's specific allegations, we believe these are wholly inaccurate," the company told CNN Thursday, adding that it was cooperating with ongoing police investigations into phone hacking and had not been asked about the work of the private investigator Watson named in Parliament.

But it said it was "well documented" that the investigator "worked for a whole variety of newspaper groups."

Murdoch's media group, which owns the Sunday tabloid News of the World, has already apologized to a number of celebrities and offered them compensation after admitting it had their phones hacked.

Actress Sienna Miller was among the victims, a British court ruling in June confirmed.

A News of the World royal correspondent and a private investigator were sent to prison in 2007 for hacking into the voice mails of members of the royal staff.

But Watson named a different investigator Wednesday, undercutting the long-standing News International claim that the practice of phone hacking was not widespread.

The Metropolitan Police are conducting an investigation called Operating Weeting into the accusations of hacking by British media.

They said Thursday the allegations they have received this year are "outside the remit of Operation Weeting."

But Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday that a "police inquiry does not need terms of reference" and that police are "free to investigate the evidence and take that wherever it leads them."

Murdoch's media empire encompasses the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Fox News and Harper Collins publishers, as well as the Times and the Sun newspapers in London.

CNN's Richard Allen Greene, Carol Jordan and Bharati Naik contributed to this report.

CNN

Sony Hacked Again, Group Claims (PC Magazine)

Sony has been hacked again, according to a group that recently infiltrated the servers at PBS.

A group that identifies itself as Lulzsec claims to have hacked into SonyPictures.com and compromised the personal information of more than 1 million users.

"Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 'music codes' and 3.5 million 'music coupons,'" Lulzsec wrote in a note posted to Pastebin.com.

Lulzsec is the same group that infiltrated PBS servers to post fake news and password dumps.

The news comes the same day that Sony brought the Sony PlayStation store back online and appeared on Capitol Hill to say there was no "clear evidence" that hackers accessed credit card information on its PlayStation Network. The company, however, said it and other tech companies are vulnerable to future attacks absent any action from Congress.

Sony has been conducting an "intensive investigation" into the hack that took down its PlayStation Network for almost a month and in looking "deeply" at the logs related to the hacked databases, "we have found no clear evidence that there was any access made to the credit card information, and we found plenty of evidence that that data was not accessed," Tim Schaaff, president of Sony Network Entertainment International, told a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee.

Almost a week after the PSN went down, Sony confirmed that hackers had obtained personal information from the network, which possibly included credit cards. The company later said that credit card information was encrypted, but it could not rule out the possibility that it was obtained by the hackers.

Schaaff said Thursday that as its investigation continued, the information it recovered about credit card data "has changed." In speaking with credit card companies, there are "no signs of unusual activity related to this breach," Schaaff said.

Still, despite pointing fingers at clandestine cyber-group Anonymous, Sony still does not know who hacked into its system. "We're working with law enforcement to try and figure that out," Schaaff said.

Last month, Sony said one of its SOE servers included mention of Anonymous. Though a group spokesman has denied involvement, it has launched distributed denial of service attacks against Sony for suing PS3 hackers.

When asked if Sony regrets pursuing PS3 hackers given that those lawsuits possibly prompted the PSN hack, Schaaff said it points to a larger problem of how companies protect their content. But if Sony hadn't gone after those hackers, it "would've played out" at another company, he said. "We are all under attack."

Furthermore, without comprehensive privacy legislation from Congress coupled with industry-wide best practices, the tech industry is vulnerable to future attacks, Schaaff speculated. In written testimony, he said Sony supports federal data breach legislation that would require companies to inform customers about any breaches in a timely and consistent manner, regardless of the state in which they reside.

"Without further assistance, we're all going to have a world of hurt in this Internet economy and we would appreciate your assistance," Schaaff told the subcommittee.

Jeanette Fitzgerald, general counsel with Epsilon Data Management, which recently had a data breach of its own, said it also supports federal legislation that would replace the patchwork of state laws governing data protection with one, federal law.

Rep. Mary Bono Mack, chair of the subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing, and trade, said "Americans need additional safeguards to prevent identity theft, and I will soon introduce legislation designed to accomplish this goal."

Her bill will focus on three guiding principles: companies and entities that hold personal information must establish and maintain security policies to prevent the unauthorized acquisition of that data; information considered especially sensitive, such as credit card numbers, should have even more robust security safeguards; and consumers should be promptly informed when their personal information has been jeopardized.

In the Senate, John Kerry and John McCain have teamed up to introduce a bill that would provide Internet users with a commercial privacy bill of rights.

Yahoo! News

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Sony's Japan music site hacked (Digital Trends)

Sony just can’t catch a break. Yesterday, SonyMusic.gr was infiltrated by hackers via an SQL injection tool. The unsophisticated attack compromised the site’s user database, leaking name, e-mails, and addresses of those registered.

Today, Sony’s Japan music site has suffered the same fate. Sophos, which discovered yesterday’s hack, found similar damage to SonyMusic.co.jp. According to Chester Wisniewski via the site’s Naked Security IT blog, Hacker News first found the affected web pages. As reported yesterday, an SQL injection was used to access the site’s contents, including its user database. Fortunately, this instance did not concede as much user information, and names, passwords, and other “personally identifiable information” are believed to be safe. But it’s still unknown what exactly hackers were able to access. Wisniewski says it is possible they could have inserted malicious code that would then affect the site’s visitors.

What’s most distressing about this latest chapter in Sony’s security saga is that it is once more proving the company’s complete negligence. These particular hacks are only utilizing Sony’s own security flaws and exposing them. One of the hackers wrote on the site “We just want to embarrass Sony some more. Can this be hack number 8? 7 and a half?”. The group’s lighthearted approach to the whole thing has made some speculate they are associated with Lulz Security. Lulz Security’s motivations are generally to prove a point rather than personal gain. The group’s Twitter posts are currently full of Sony bashings.

Even if Lulz Security is behind the attack and has no interest in stealing customer information, the scale of Sony’s mounting security failures is enough to keep subscribers anxious. Of course it’s also enough to see many of them drop Sony services altogether.

Yahoo! News

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