The fallout from “Operation: Payback is a Bitch” continues, although it is not clear yet who exactly is at fault in this case. During ongoing attacks from the Low Orbit Ion Cannon DDoS tool a lawfirm infamous for prosecuting file sharers has experienced a breach and will be sued itself for accidentally sharing sensitive information.

V3 says the law firm is facing legal action over data breach

The ACS-Law web site was hit by a series of DDoS attacks over the weekend carried out by web group Anonymous as part of a wide-ranging attack on pro-copyright organisations known as Operation Payback.

The breach of ACS-Law’s systems reportedly resulted in the release of a file containing 365MB of emails containing credit card information on suspected offenders, as well as emails written by the firm’s boss Andrew Crossley.

Rights group Privacy International has reported the firm to the ICO, as the data breach was not technically caused by the hack, but by a failure to put appropriate technical safeguards in place.

The good news is ACS:Law is well experienced in notifying people. They apparently sent 10,000 letters in just the first two weeks of January 2010. In that case they were said to be trying to blackmail people by telling them to pay or be sued for sharing information illegally. Now they just have to turn it around a little and say they were sharing information illegally so they are being sued and will pay people.

More than the privacy of suspected offender information is at stake. The Inquirer shows why some of the email exposed in the breach, now available on the Pirate Bay, will probably further damage the law firm’s already controversial business model:

Crossley bragged about how much money he has obtained from penning his emails to people. He wrote, “Spent much of the weekend looking for a new car. Finances are much better so can put £20-30k down. May go for a Lambo or Ferrari. I am so predictable!” Later emails reveal that he bought a Jeep Compass 2.4CVT.

In a letter to NG3Sys, which did the outfit’s Internet monitoring, he told it that it would receive on average about £1,000 per 150 letters sent.

[…]

Other emails include the approach used to screw people out of cash when they are clearly not liable for copyright infringement.

Perhaps most interesting is how attackers also try to capitalize on search results to infect more computers, documented by Panda Labs.

I will cover this next month along with other high-profile breaches in my RSA 2010 Europe presentation on the Top Ten Breaches.

A US jet charter company had an expensive and dangerous crash in 2005. This led investigators to discover Platinum Jet Management LLC was operating a high risk and illegal airline. NJ.com says one of the pilots has now pleaded guilty to several serious charges

Vieira told assistant U.S. Attorney Scott B. McBride that he falsified flight logs, altered weight and center of gravity graphs, and routinely flew illegal charter flights that violated federal safety regulations.

One of the practices of Platinum was to overfill fuel tanks at cheaper airports and then alter flight manifests to hide the extra weight. Another practice was to hire unqualified pilots and other staff. The performance of the flight attendant during the 2005 crash probably gave investigators several big clues about airline management practices.

…a Miami model and dancer — did not know how to open the door of the plane to evacuate those inside

NJ.com points out that passengers, obviously who were high-value assets, paid nearly $100,000 per charter even though the company was not even certified to fly.

The legalis.net report says the managing editor of Google.fr and Google Inc. has been sentenced for defamation of a person. Google is required to remove all “related searches” or face a 500 euro/day fine.

Interesting to note that the Court of Paris said Google did not show good faith. The search engine company had argued that because their search is “automated” and determined by “objective factors” they could not be held liable for results. This was not accepted as a defense.

Le TGI de Paris a refusé d’admettre l’absence d’implication de Google du fait du caractère automatique de son système. Entre autres arguments, il a noté, comme dans le jugement du 4 décembre 2009, que Google ne prend pas en compte certains libellés de recherche lancés par les internautes qui pourraient offenser un grand nombre d’entre eux, ce qui suppose nécessairement qu’un tri préalable est fait entre les requêtes enregistrées dans la base de données. De même, Google permet au public de signaler des requêtes qui ne devraient pas être suggérées, laissant supposer qu’une intervention humaine est possible. Sur l’atteinte à la liberté d’expression qu’il y aurait à supprimer telles associations de mots, la 17ème du TGI a adopté une position différente de celle exprimée par le juge des référés dans son ordonnance du 22 juillet 2010. Cette fonctionnalité a-t-elle remarqué a pour seule utilité d’éviter à l’utilisateur de saisir la totalité d’une requête et « qu’en état de cause la suppression éventuelle de tel ou tel des thèmes de recherche proposés ne priverait aucun d’entre eux de la faculté de disposer, mais à leur seule initiative et sans y être incité par quiconque, de toutes les références indexées par le moteur de recherches correspondant à telle association de mots avec tel patronyme ou telle raison sociale de leur choix ».

The first thing that comes to mind is that Google has historically argued the opposite of their defense in this case. They have said they have a uniquely designed engine that has been tuned for better results.

It is from their particular algorithm based on their superior engineering that you get results you would want more than from other search engines. They are in the drivers’ seat when they say they can tune their engine to present results that are good instead of bad, or popular instead of unpopular, or objective instead of biased.

No matter what you call it, they have been taking credit for results with the tool that they programmed. Now that results were found to be objectionable by a person I find it odd to see them argue in court that they just passively ride in the back seat. This is like a newspaper saying they have no control over the content they publish after marketing themselves as an accurate source of news.

More to the point, the tool did not malfunction. Google did not claim someone broke in or modified the results without authorization. Instead they said the results were the natural byproduct of public opinion that they just pass along, as if their search engine adds no value at all. Easy to see how the court reacted — protecting individuals from defamation should be within the capabilities of a search engine, just like protection from other forms of harm have been developed.

Google’s SafeSearch Filtering says it “blocks web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results”. They should have presented a defense along these lines rather than try to cook up some weird concept of universal machine-based objectivity.