Heather Mills claims Mirror journalist admitted phone hacking

The BBC Newsnight programme has another scoop on its hands, by broadcasting a claim by Heather Mills, the former wife of Sir Paul McCartney, that a journalist hacked into voicemails left by the ex-Beatle on her mobile phone.

What’s interesting is that Mills claims that the journalist who admitted the hacking to her was a senior figure from the Mirror group of newspapers, rather than a member of the News of the World that has up until now been at the centre of the phone hacking scandal.

Heather Mills told the BBC that she was called by an unidentified journalist in 2001, who quoted parts of a message that her then boyfriend McCartney had left on her mobile phone after an argument.

Mills, who by all accounts is not someone who you want to get on the wrong side of, frightened off the journalist by saying:

“You’ve obviously hacked my phone and if you do anything with this story … I’ll go to the police.”

The reporter is said…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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