Hacker adds to Bolton's woes

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This was published 15 years ago

Hacker adds to Bolton's woes

By Mark Hawthorne

YOU have to wonder just how well BrisConnections investor Nick Bolton has been sleeping in the past month.

There's the burden of his $140 million debt to the Brisbane toll-road builder.

There's the kerfuffle over the extraordinary general meeting he has called to try to close down the BrisConnections unit trusts to which his company, Australian Style Investments, owes money.

There's the expensive legal action in the Supreme Court, where BrisConnections is trying to have Australian Style wound up.

Then, just to cap it off, there has been a breach of security within his own IT company, which registers domain names.

In January the personal account details, including credit card numbers, of up to 60,000 customers were stolen from Bottle Domains by a computer hacker, who has allegedly tried to sell the information on the internet.

The Australian Federal Police is investigating and a 22-year-old Perth man has been arrested over the theft and charged with dishonestly dealing in personal financial information.

It seems that Bottle's records were hacked into, and the account information stolen, despite claims that the company was compliant with the latest security standards.

According to industry website eCommerce Report, the alleged thief offered the file of customer records for sale on a hackers website in February — eCommerce even obtained a screen grab of the file posted by the hacker — which included the complete customer credit card details of 25,000 people.

The Australian High Tech Crime Centre, which is part of the AFP, took the unusual step of sending the country's major banks a list of customer account numbers that had been "compromised" by the theft.

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NAB confirmed that "a small number" of the credit cards on that list had already been hit by fraud, and said that customers would not be liable for those losses.

Commonwealth Bank confirmed receiving the list of card accounts at risk.

Several industry websites have tried to contact Bottle Domains to ask why it hasn't told its customers that their credit-card details may have been stolen.

ANZ said the potential for fraud was considered "low risk", while Westpac said none of its customers had been affected.

Customers of Bottle Domains were notified of the security breach by the Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) last month.

It issued the following statement: "auDA has been notified by the Australian Federal Police that there has been a security incident which may have affected customers of accredited registrar Bottle Domains."

An email to customers warned: "You may already have received an email from Bottle Domains informing you that they have recently been the target of a security breach. As a result of the breach, it is possible that your account information has been accessed by third parties."

Court short

JUDGES dislike having their evenings, weekends and public holidays intruded on by the turning wheels of justice. But they must especially hate it when the hearing they turn up for is abandoned before it even starts.

So it was yesterday for Federal Court justice Tony North, who turned up on Labour Day only to find his labour wasn't needed.

Justice North's public holiday was interrupted by the need for a ruling on the unseemly wrangling between rival biotechnology companies - Cytopia and Avexa - both seeking connubial bliss with $70 million cashbox Progen Pharmaceuticals.

Just as North, as well as two court assistants, eight lawyers and a cranky security guard settled in, counsel for Progen rose to tell the court that a merger proposal with Avexa had been called off and the hearing was now irrelevant.

When the issue of costs then arose, Justice North suggested dragging the parties back to court to decide the matter - in "late December".

"It's called backlash," Justice North told the court. Jokingly, we think.

WA property crash

IN YET another sure sign the mining bubble has burst, the number of million-dollar properties sold in Perth has fallen by a whopping 45 per cent.

According to the Real Estate Institute of WA, 1527 Perth homes sold for $1 million or more in 2008, down from 2813 the previous year, and 2066 $1 million-plus sales in 2006.

Indeed, 171 of Perth's suburbs could boast that a home sold for $1 million or more in 2007. That was down to just 127 suburbs last year.

Lexus in a spin

THE world of client publishing is little more than spin-doctoring on glossy paper.

Even so, Full Disclosure notes that the latest edition of Lexus magazine, published by Text Pacific, is not just crassly opportunistic, it's also a bit puzzling.

With the fires across Victoria only just brought under control, Sydney-based Text Pacific has sent out a press release stating: "In this issue, following the devastation of Victoria's bushfires, Lexus, in our own way, pays tribute to this remarkable state. Strap yourself in for a weekend away through Victoria's historic Alpine region in Lexus' first high-performance vehicle - the IS F."

Apparently, driving by in a Lexus can help "ensure life returns to normal".

We're not sure that a high-performance Lexus on our roads is the kind of tribute bushfire victims need - especially one a couple of hundred kilometres away, in the state's Alpine region, which escaped bushfires this year.

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