Times reporter arrested over NightJack blogger email hack

A former journalist with The Times has been arrested in connection with an alleged hack of a blogger’s email account in 2009.

28-year-old Patrick Foster was arrested in the early hours of the morning by British police, investigating the hacking of an email account belonging to the anonymous police blogger Nightjack in 2009.

In 2009, The Times newspaper outed Lancashire detective Richard Horton, revealing him to be the anonymous author of the NightJack blog.

The paper had successfully overturned an injunction preventing it from identifying the blog’s author, arguing that the information was in the public’s interest and that the author’s identity had been obtained through legitimate journalistic means.

However, the Leveson Inquiry was told earlier this year that not only had Foster hacked into the email account of the police blogger, but also The Times had fought its battle in the courts to unmask the NightJack blogger *after* its reporter had admitted his offence to the paper’s management.

Editor James Harding apologised earlier this…

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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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