Social Media Hacked

The social media platforms of Skype have been hacked by a group claiming to be the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA).

The group posted anti-surveillance messages, including a message telling people not to use email services of Microsoft, the owner of Skype.

It claimed "they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments".

The hack comes after recent revelations about surveillance programs being run by US intelligence agencies.

"Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook). They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments," the hackers posted on Skype's Twitter account and its blog.

Skype acknowledged that it had been hacked but said that "no user information was compromised".

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which says it supports President Bashar al-Assad, has been behind recent hack attacks on the New York Times and Twitter.

The SEA has also targeted various other media companies, including the BBC, CNN and the Guardian.

Last year, whistle-blower Edward Snowden leaked documents which detailed the extent of surveillance programmes carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA).

According to the documents, the agencies had "backdoor" access to the servers of nine major technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

All the companies named have denied their involvement.

In Microsoft's case, the Guardian newspaper claimed the documents showed that the NSA had access to most of Microsoft's flagship products including Hotmail, Outlook.com, Skydrive and Skype.

The NSA reportedly said in the documents that it had improved its oversight of Skype so much that it could now collect three times as many calls from the service than before.

Even before Skype was bought by Microsoft it was providing information on some of its users through the surveillance program known as Prism, the report had claimed.

Since the revelations, Microsoft has teamed up with seven other leading technology firms to form an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance group.

The group which includes Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, has called for "wide-scale changes" to US government surveillance.

It has written a letter to the US President and Congress arguing that current surveillance practice "undermines the freedom" of people.

Hacking Pirate

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Warg (below)will be deported next week to Denmark to face charges of stealing confidential data. 

Mr Warg is being deported from Sweden where he is serving a one-year jail sentence for a separate hack attack.  Danish police want to talk to him about a hack attack on computers holding police files.

Last month, Mr Warg wrote to the Swedish government urging it not to let him be extradited.  In his letter he said it had been shown that his computer, which was used in the Danish hack, could have been controlled remotely and the attack carried out by someone else.

The Swedish government threw out his request and he is now due to be transferred to Denmark on 27 November.

In Denmark, Mr Warg is suspected of being involved with an attack that took place between April and August last year on computers run by services company CSC. Mr Warg and a Danish accomplice are accused of downloading lots of files from CSC mainframes that included documents about wanted criminals.

Mr Warg was deported from Cambodia to Sweden to answer charges relating to his involvement with the notorious Pirate Bay file-sharing site. Once in Sweden he had to face separate charges relating to an attack on IT firm Logica. An initial two-year sentence for this hack attack was reduced to a year on appeal.

The Pirate Bay (commonly abbreviated TPB) is a website that provides torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol.

Pirate Bay was established in November 2001 by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån (The Piracy Bureau); it has been run as a separate organization since October 2004. The Pirate Bay was first run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, who are known by their nicknames "anakata" and "TiAMO", respectively. They have both been accused of "assisting in making copyrighted content available" by the Motion Picture Association of America.

On 31 May 2006, the website's servers in Stockholm were raided and taken away by Swedish police, leading to three days of downtime. The Pirate Bay has been involved in a number of lawsuits, both as plaintiff and as defendant.

In some countries, ISPs have been ordered to block access to the website. Since then, proxies have been made all around the world providing access to The Pirate Bay.