NewsCorp Denies Hacking ONdigital Smartcards

News Corporation has hit back against claims that it worked with hackers and pirates through its subsidiary, NDS Group, to bring down the competing digital TV platform ONdigital (later ITV Digital).

On Tuesday, TechWeekEuprope published a story which detailed the BBC’s Panorama investigation. The programme claimed NDS hired the professional hacker Oliver Kommerling to break the ONdigital smart card codes, and financed the pirate website “The House Of Ill Compute”, or THOIC, that distributed these codes.

News Corporation has called the story a “gross misrepresentation” of the company and accused the BBC of manipulating information.

We honestly didn’t do it

NewsCorp has denied any wrongdoing in a press statement. “The BBC’s Panorama program was a gross misrepresentation of NDS’s role as a high quality and leading provider of technology and services to the pay-TV industry, as are many of the other press accounts that have piled on – if not exaggerated – the BBC’s inaccurate claims.”

The corporation blamed BBC for manipulating the e-mails to produce “unfair and baseless” accusations. It said it is proud to have worked with NDS and to have supported it in its “aggressive” fight against piracy and copyright infringement. NewsCorp has also expressed support to the executive chairman of NDS Abe Peled, who was secretly filmed while being interviewed “off the record”.

A letter of complaint from Peled addressed to the BBC said that Panorama had “manipulated” two emails “without checking their authenticity with us”. According to Peled, this demonstrated “a flagrant disregard to the BBC’s broadcasting code, misleading viewers and inciting widespread misreporting”.

Peled also complained about the email sent to Adams and shown on air by Panorama as “evidence of NDS’s encouragement of piracy associated with the thoic.com website”. He claimed the email was “sent from an undercover agent” to NDS, and was therefore “further proof” that NDS was collecting information in the fight against pay-TV piracy.

“Seems every competitor and enemy piling on with lies and libels. So bad, easy to hit back hard, which preparing,” warned Rupert Murdoch’s menacing tweet yesterday.

You can’t scare the BBC

According to the Guardian, News Corp’s lawyers sought to derail Panorama in advance by sending round denials and legal threats to other media organisations. They said any forthcoming BBC allegations that NDS “has been involved in illegal activities designed to cause the collapse of a business rival” would be false and libellous, and demanded they not be repeated.

The BBC has stood by its investigation, which was approved by the director of news, Helen Boaden. A statement from the broadcasting corporation said: “Nothing in the correspondence undermines the evidence presented in the programme.”

The NDS complaint letter did not refer to or criticise Panorama’s main interviewee, Lee Gibling, a former hacker who ran the THOIC website, and who alleged that NDS “delivered the actual software” to his pirate website that could be used to hack the ONdigital code “with prior instructions that it should go to the widest community”. Gibling later said THOIC’s goal was to constantly work to damage ONdigital, “flogging it until it broke”.

Interestingly, earlier this month NewsCorp had sold off NDS Group to Cisco for approximately $5 billion (£3.12b). The transaction is subject to regulatory review in the US and elsewhere, and is expected to close during the second half of the year.

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