I picked this up over the weekend:

BEGINS
An unknown Indian hacker is being 'charged' with the greatest cyber-heist in history for allegedly helping a criminal gang steal identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than 2.8 billion pounds in illegal funds.

An investigation by Scotland's Sunday Herald newspaper has discovered that late on Thursday night a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of UK's Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

There are no details yet on how the hacker was identified to be an Indian and if a probe is on to identify the person. It is also not known if the hotel chain has alerted the police about the heist.
ENDS

I love the word "charged" in this context, since it means precisely nothing, at least form the way the article is written.

It looks as if 8 million data records with full credit card details and home addresses and phone numbers has been allowed to escape into the wild.  That can't be good news.

There is a link to the main article from http://complianceandprivacy.com/News.asp where I've also covered a story about Viet Nam's new anti spam laws and an interesting conference in The Philippines which says that they absolutely need data privacy laws if they want to be a Business Process Outsourcing centre of excellence.  Not that it stopped India, did it?
--

Tim Trent - Consultant
Tel: +44 (0)7710 126618
web: ComplianceAndPrivacy.com - where busy executives go to find the news first
personal blog: timtrent.blogspot.com/

Marketing by Permission

Important: This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify us and remove it from your system. This email and any attachment(s) are believed to be virus-free, but it is the responsibility of the recipient to make all the necessary virus checks. This email and any attachments to it are copyright of Meadowood Associates, owners of Compliance And Privacy, unless otherwise stated. Their copying, transmission, reproduction in whole or in part may only be undertaken with the express permission, in writing, of Meadowood Associates, at Meadowood House, 30 Redditch, Bracknell, Berkshire, RG12 0TT.

All archives of messages are stored permanently and are available to the world wide web community at large at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/data-protection.html

Selected commands (the command has been filled in below in the body of the email if you are receiving emails in HTML format):

All user commands can be found at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/help/commandref.htm and are sent in the body of an otherwise blank email to [log in to unmask]

Any queries about sending or receiving messages please send to the list owner [log in to unmask]

(Please send all commands to [log in to unmask] not the list or the moderators, and all requests for technical help to [log in to unmask], the general office helpline)