The UK Ministry of Defence has come under attack from a hacker who is allegedly threatening to target military satellites unless a £3 million ransom is handed over. According to a story in today’s Daily Mail, the hacker has already seized control of one satellite, altering its course. The satellite in question is said to be involved in co-ordinating bombing raids on Iraq. Other targets for the hacker have been GCHQ - the spying operation that listens in on telephone calls and other communications - and a number of UK operations overseas. Officers from the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit are said to be engaged in tracking down the source of the attacks. The authorities are said to have been so concerned about the attack on the satellite that the prime minister, Tony Blair, was informed. High profile hackings are becoming more common. One of the most well known was involved two UK hackers, Datastream Cowboy (Richard Pryce) and Kuji (Mathew Bevan), who caught the CIA’s attention in 1994 after the Pentagon’s computer was broken into. The South Korean atomic research institute was also hacked, provoking fears that World War III might be started by a teenage computer hacker sitting in his bedroom. ®