Anonymous To Release Sun, News of the World Emails

siliconbits writes "After having hacked Rupert Murdoch's flagship news website, thesun.co.uk, and redirecting its readers to a spoof front page and pilfering its email servers, Anonymous' unofficial mouthpiece, Sabu, has revealed that the group is 'sitting on [the sun's & NOTW's] emails' with a press release from Anonymous & possibly more coming in a few hours. While that website has already been taken down, the email bounty is likely to be potentially more damaging with Sabu releasing details of two of the Sun's top three employees, Rebekah Wade and Bill Akass, the former editors of the Sun and News of the World respectively as well as Lee Wells & Danny Rogers, Editorial Support Manager at News International and Sun Online Editorial Manager respectively, as a taster of what's coming next."

Re:Compromising the investigation

[ScentCone]

Jurors who have been previously exposed to evidence, and who have encountered it in a context that isn't up to the non-prejudicial standards of the court, wouldn't be considered reasonably neutral. If certain messages are widely spread around in the public because Anonymous thinks their priorities and standards are more important than the prosecutors', then that could indeed make such evidence essentially unusable in court.

Re:Compromising the investigation

[Red Flayer]

That's not how it works in the US, I dunno about the UK (I assume you're from the US due to your spelling of defense).

If the authorities made no effort to induce the illegal acquisition of the evidence, then it would still be admissable in US court AFAIK. The evidence if only tainted if the authorities, or someone acting at their behest (not a third-party with no link to the authorities), performs an illegal source. Chain of custody would be an issue, I would think, because it would have to be proven (more or less) that the emails were not altered after being lifted from NOTW's servers.

*I know this from watching Perry Mason, Columbo, and Law & Order reruns; IANAL; YMMV; if you want legal advice consult a real lawyer; Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

It wasn't Anonymous...

[pcgfx805]

It was Lulzsec.

Re:Something Fishy

[amicusNYCL]

Why is that hard to believe? It's not the case that it's suddenly become easier to hack servers, the issue is that more people have the knowledge required to do so (and that old vulnerabilities are left unpatched). I mean, some of the hacks have been basic SQL injection or URL vulnerabilities that any competent programmer would know how to avoid. Those crappy systems have been in place for a while, people are just now starting to exploit them for the hell of it. It could have been going on all this time by groups that weren't announcing that they were doing it, like the Chinese government.

I mean, consider this: when Citibank got "hacked" a while ago, and had account details stolen, do you know what the vulnerability was? The URL of the account page looked something like this:

www.citibank.com/my_account.asp?id=<your credit card number here>

All they did was change the number and, voila, it turns out that Citibank was not bothering to authorize the logged-in user to view the given account. Once you were logged in, you could view any account. That's not exactly world-class security, that's something that most kids on the w3schools forum could warn you about. It's an embarrassment that a financial company like Citibank would pay to have something like that built by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Re:Hacking innocent people's email accounts?!?!?

[Alyred]

Also, don't forget one of the biggest accusations of illegal activity was that it appears that the police were bribed by representatives of Murdoch Corp. We'll see how that portion comes out in court, but it appears that it might have gone all the way to the top, hence the resignations of the chief of Scotland Yard. We may see even more as apparently, one of the editors of the News of the World during the time of the phone hacking/alleged bribery went to join the Prime Minister's cabinet.

NO REAL HARM?!?!

[SoTerrified]

The phone hackers destroyed no property, deprived no owners of any of its use. I don't think there is any real harm here.

NO HARM?! In case you missed the details of the original case that started the whole firestorm...
In 2002, Milly Dowler was kidnapped, then murdered later. When she went missing, News of the World hacked her phone. Seeing her voice mailbox was full, they deleted some messages (deleting potential evidence) so they could maybe get some new information. Meanwhile, the police saw that 'Milly' accessed her phone mailbox, so they downgraded her case, treating her as a low priority runaway. That meant that critical time tracking her was lost that could've got the police to her sooner and potentially saved her life.

No harm indeed...

Re:You know you have a PR problem

[beowulfcluster]

They were planning on doing it anyway and replace it with a sunday edition of The Sun. Acting like they're closing it down because it's the decent thing to do is just a convenient excuse.