Private website linked to Murdoch targeted rivals: report

The Observer newspaper claims to be in possession of documents that a computer piracy website that secretly supported by one of Rupert Murdoch's companies, openly promoted advice on how to hack BSkyB's rivals.

Newspaper emails obtained by them reveal that a senior NDS employee of the Murdoch company insisted he was personally responsible for setting up The House of III Compute (Thoic) site. According to NDS, it paid Thoic's chief hacker Lee Gbiling for information allowing it to monitor and prosecute software pirates legitimately.

However, the documents provide a new perspective on potentially toxic allegation that came up in a BBC Panorama programme broadcast last week, over a decade after they first materialised, and which was vehemently denied by Murdoch and his News Corp empire.

The allegations come at a time when the media regulator Ofcom is in the process of assessing News Corp's near-40 per cent holding in BSkyB in the backdrop of the phone-hacking scandal that led to the closure of Murdoch's News of the World newspaper. At its peak in 2000, Thoic claimed to have been receiving as many as 3 million hits a day.

The website published its first ''ezine'', a downloadable magazine, in 2001, which was shared with the Observer by one of its members. The issue featured two articles on hacking Sky rival OnDigital's SECA software system, which was developed by a French broadcaster, Canal Plus, as a rival to NDS's technology. OnDigital, was later renamed as ITVDigital. It was set up by terrestrial broadcasters Granada and Carlton in 1998 but went into administration in 2002.

A hacker by the name Barrell describes in the articles the programming necessary to facilitate the hack and explains the need to phone OnDigital so that the company could send a signal to the hacker's set-top box.