Hacker testifies News Corp unit hired him

[laststeamtrain]

Source: Reuters

Hacker testifies News Corp unit hired him

By Tori Richards Wed Apr 23, 9:06 PM ET

A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp (NWSa.N) unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service.

Christopher Tarnovsky -- who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada -- testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp's NDS Group (NNDS.O) by DISH Network Corp (DISH.O).

The trial could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in damage awards.

NDS, which provides security technology to a global satellite network that includes satellite TV service DirecTV, denies the claims, saying it was only engaged in reverse engineering -- looking at a technology product to determine how it works, a standard in the electronics industry.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080424/tc_nm/echostar_newscorp_dc

[snot]

1. and the point of paying someone to develop the software but not using it would be . . .

(sarcasm)

[mcctatas]

2. Why am I not surprised?

friggin NewsCorp :grr:

[merwin]

5. It's not just NewsCorp

Corporate Espionage is everywhere.

[cascadiance]

3. Hmm... I wonder if they were "sniffing" Free Speech TV stuff!

Sounds like that would be Rupert Murdoch's style!

They're in the middle of their fundraising campaign now too...

[merwin]

6. Rupert Murdoch is all about whatever makes money.

If Obama or Clinton becomes president, he will be lobbying in the liberal direction, guaranteed.

[cascadiance]

4. Check the video link in the upper left corner...

"News Corp Empire in Trouble?"

I REALLY hope these bums don't try to buy my company (Yahoo)... They want to "dump" Myspace on us in exchange for stock.

[formercia]

8. Since you work for Yahoo and we're speaking about malware

why does the process gam_server start whenever I access my Yahoo mail account and remain active until I log out?

I think it's some kind of web sniffing script.

[cascadiance]

9. I think this is a Linux server thing... You're probably running Linux

I see nothing about a gam_server process referenced through our internal search engines.

Do a google on it... You'll probably get documents that references pages like the following which I think gam_server is a part of:

http://www.gnome.org/~veillard/gamin/

But then again, this topic probably could better be discussed on slashdot where you probably have a lot more experts who can talk about it.

[formercia]

10. FreeBSD/Firefox.

It's a Yahoo specific issue.

[cascadiance]

11. It is as the link I noted an open source product that is likely on FreeBSD as well...

The only thing it likely has to do with Yahoo is if you are downloading email, etc. which kicks this thing off to look at what files, etc. it is creating. Yahoo has nothing to do with it itself.

Here's another link that explains it more on the page itself:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/45337-do-i-need-gam_server.html

[formercia]

12. I already checked that

My system does not have gamin installed. The process only starts when logging into Yahoo and remains active until I log out of Xwindows. If I try to stop the process while logged-in, it restarts.

It only, I repeat, only starts when logging into Yahoo. No other program or web site initiates it.

It may be disguised to look like gamin, but it is not.

I think it's spyware.

[cascadiance]

15. I think you're asking something that's beyond what I can help you with...

I'm not in the customer care department here, and from the looks of it, there's potentially a misconfigured (or mal configured, if it is as you suspect) gamin process or something masquerading as such. I highly doubt that this is something that Yahoo wrote, but as I note before, if you are interacting with a service that's popping mail records or doing other things that engages in file updating activity on your system it could trigger this sort of process firing up during that time, as it would seem to happen even legitimately on other systems where people report 40% of their CPU sucked away by it. It sounds like someone needs to sit down with you (at least virtually so) and analyze your set up. I can only give you pointers to where I think there might be some help on solving this. I have looked through our internal search system here and don't see anything that would indicate we do anything special with gamin or gam_server other than a few installation (as user) issues on internal end user systems, so I can't point you to anything there either. I suggest calling Yahoo Customer Care and see if they can help you on this.

[formercia]

16. I appreciate your help

The primary reason I brought it up was to make you aware of it. I think what's happening is that someone is redirecting my browser to a hostile site masquerading as Yahoo and enabling a script that tracks my web usage as well as other activity.

Customer care is a waste of time. All I got from them was boilerplate responses. I can understand them not sevicing free accounts, but I had a paying account. No longer.

I've had accesses to DU redirected as well. The phony pages can be spotted because they are not in sync with post data and when you reload the page, the data changes in strange ways. It reminded me of the scene from 'The Matrix' where Neo sees a black cat walk across the doorway, then sees what appears to be the same cat repeat itself.

Big Brother is watching.

[cascadiance]

17. This happens for a lot of high traffic sites like Ebay and Pay Pal, etc...

Yes, I think there needs to be a solution, but to expect the companies being targeted by fishers, etc. to completely solve this problem is expecting too much. Yes, they have an interest when their business is affected in helping solve the problem, but ultimately, we need other government agencies and entities going after some of these criminals and prosecuting them, etc.

Another place to go is to talk to those responsible for your browser (Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Microsoft?) and ask them to clarify how their browser is being "hijacked" by redirects that should be exposed if they aren't going to legitimate sites and "masquerading" sites. Check your DNS server too, to make sure you don't have a "hijacked" DNS server that is mapping the wrong IP addresses to yahoo.com sites or the like. That's talking to your ISP.

[AlphaCentauri]

13. "Do a google on it" haaaaaaaa thats funny

why not do a yahoo on it

:rofl:

[cascadiance]

14. Ya caught me! :) I still unashamedly use google for news hits...

They do have better bots that grab more stuff than Yahoo's does, although I think at times Google has stranger ways of "censoring" hits. If I feel I'm being censored sometimes I'll go to Yahoo instead.

[nongrata]

7. This one's now safenet

It's the knife you don't see that's the greater threat.