By Sally Watson, 17 January 2000 18:08
NEWS A team of British hackers has caused chaos by breaking into the confidential files of at least 12 multinational firms and demanding blackmail money to keep the information secret. According to a report in The Sunday Times, credit card giant, Visa, received a demand for £10m last year after the group stole computer source codes and threatened to crash the company's entire system. Visa now claims it has "hardened its system" and improved firewall security so the breach couldn't happen again. According to police, the attack could be linked to at least 12 other hacking incidents, including an assault of Virgin.net earlier this month (see 'Virgin Net pulls its email service over security fears' http://www.silicon.com/a34974 ) Scotland Yard has launched an investigation into the attacks.
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