Law and Order

The global security analysis company Strategic Forecasting Inc will settle a class action lawsuit brought by one of its customers over a crippling attack by hackers who stole data of clients including Henry Kissinger, court documents show.

U.S. District Judge Denis Hurley in Central Islip on New York's Long Island earlier this month gave his stamp of approval to a proposed settlement in a case that was filed in January.

Prosecutors want the man who broke into the email accounts of Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis and other celebrities to receive a hefty prison fine and pay tens of thousands of dollars to his victims.

In a filing, U.S. attorney requested that Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Fla., serve 71 months in prison and pay a $150,000 fine. He would also should pay Johansson $66,179.46 in compensation after hijacking nude images of the actress from her personal email account.

The General Court of the European Union has made a small reduction in the fine that Microsoft has to pay for its abuse of its dominant market position and refusal to provide interoperability documentation. The 1998 case, brought by the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba Team and assisted by SIIA, ECIS, IBM, Red Hat and Oracle, was being appealed by Microsoft, which wanted a 2008 ruling and fine to be annulled and to have its costs paid by the Commission and others.

The Federal Trade Commission is suing a major hotel chain and its subsidiaries for allegedly failing to secure the financial information of its guests, which led to fraudulent charges of more than $10 million and the siphoning out of hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers.

The complaint (PDF), announced Tuesday, centers on the fact that New Jersey-based Wyndham Worldwide Corp. experienced three data breaches in under three years. In each case, the intruders made off with financial information by breaching the company's Phoenix data center.

Rhode Island state law makers voted this month to repeal an obscure 1989 law that forbid spreading untruths online, and punished scoff-laws with a misdemeanor charge and a $500 fine.

The law was enacted to stop scammers and con artists from preying on the denizens of the newly-founded Web. But it also weirdly included over-broad language that, "outlawed the 'transmission of false data' regardless of whether liars stood to profit from their deception or not," reported the Associated Press.

The FBI arrested 24 hackers from across the globe, including the leader and members of the global hacking group UGNazi on Tuesday. The people arrested were all men and ranged from 18 to 25-years old Hackers from the US, Norway, Australia, Japan, Italy and the UK were included in the massive operation. Eleven people were arrested in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Manhattan US Attorney's office said.

Two members of the computer hacking group Lulzsec have pleaded guilty to charges they attacked several high profile websites.

Ryan Cleary, 19, and Jake Davis, 18, admitted being part of Lulzsec, an offshoot of the Anonymous collective. They and two others - Ryan Ackroyd, 25, and a 17-year-old boy - deny other similar hacking charges.

On Friday, the Gioconda Law Group PLLC, a New York-based brand protection and anti-counterfeiting law firm filed a suit in federal court at Manhattan accusing Arthur Wesley Kenzie, a self-proclaimed Canadian cyber sleuth. Gioconda accused Kenzey of cybersquatting, trademark infringement and unlawful interception of a law firm’s private electronic communications in violation of federal laws. The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction and over $1 million in damages.

A Cowra man charged with hacking into systems owned by telco wholesaler Platform Networks has been sentenced to two-and-a-half years' jail by an Orange District Court.

David Noel Cecil, a 25-year-old unemployed truck driver, initially faced up to 12 years' jail on a total 40 charges of unauthorised access and modification to computer systems maintained by Platform, which was acquired by EFTel in August last year.

Police will arrest Julian Assange even if he is granted asylum with one legal expert claiming his only way out of the country is becoming Ecuador's representative to the UN.

The WikiLeaks founder has spent the past two nights holed up in the South American country’s London embassy, in an attempt to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning over alleged sex crimes. He will discover later today if Ecuador plans to grant him asylum.