Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was yesterday facing fresh allegations over its business practices after an Australian newspaper released 14,000 emails concerning one of the group’s security subsidiaries.
The emails, said to be from the hard drive of an ex-head of security at NDS, a former News Corp subsidiary specialising in set-top box technology, appear to show that the company paid computer hackers to work with its “operational security” unit.
The Australian Financial Review claimed that NDS’s activities in Australia in 1999 caused millions of dollars of damage to Mr Murdoch’s rivals in the country’s nascent pay-TV market. The business models of Austar, Optus and Foxtel were all damaged by a wave of high-tech piracy at that time.