Summer Holidays
THE BYRON SHIRE Volume 27 #29 Tuesday, January 1, 2013 Phone 02 6684 1777 Fax 02 6684 1719 editor@echo.net.au adcopy@echo.net.au www.echo.net.au 23,200 copies every week
Inside this week
THERE IS NO PLANET B
CAB AUDIT
Editorial: The year 2012 in review – p10
Letters by you sent to us then published – p11
Need a tradie? See Service Directory – p28
Best gig guide on the north coast – p22
Byron Shire Council Notices Council closed this week
Githabul take a stand against CSG mining
Diggin’ for dirt club
Hans Lovejoy
Tasman and Jetson spent some time at the Mullumbimby Community Garden on Sunday getting ready for the Dirt Club activities which will run for three Wednesdays, staring from January 9. For more information on how the kids can get down and dirty, visit: www.mullumcommunitygarden.wordpress.com. Photo Eve Jeffery
Legal preparations are underway by the Githabul Indigenous people around Kyogle to dissolve the Githabul Nation Aboriginal Corporation (GNAC) which they say approved mining on their country without their consent or approval. It comes as a peace camp is being assembled in response to planned coal-seam gas mining just west of Kyogle, near the towns of Ettrick and Doubtful Creek. Githabul elder Gloria Williams told The Echo that ‘GNAC is now dead to us. They do not speak for the tribe or have consent. Proper consultation with tribes did not happen. We now know that it is all about mining.’ The Echo understands that representatives of ten Githabul families signed off on mining through native title yet broke agreements regarding updates and contact with the rest of the tribe. Gunham Badi Jakamarra, who is representing the Githabuls, told The Echo that despite the government being advised in writing that the tribe no longer recognise GNAC, they have continued on page 3
Byron Community School held to cyber-ransom Story & photo Eve Jeffery
You wouldn’t think that high-tech international blackmail, complete with ransom demands and secret offshore bank accounts, would the domain of a local primary school, but that’s exactly what Byron Community Primary School has been dealing with since October 2011. The school has fallen victim to a ransomware attack.
Ransomware, also referred to in some cases as crypto-viruses, cryptotrojans or crypto-worms, comprises a class of malware which restricts access to the computer system that it infects, and demands a ransom paid to the creator of the malware in order for the restriction to be removed. The Byron school had their system locked up and then an email arrived. ‘One Monday morning I got in to school and the IT guy was here and he
said that we had a problem’, says Frank Binkley, the financial manager at the school. ‘He told me that the server had been hacked and encrypted.
Server hacked ‘No-one could access it. We managed to get in and get the internet working and there was an email from the hackers. A man using the alias Jack Williams contacted us and said that the database had been encrypt-
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ed and that the sophisticated code would not be able to be broken. He told us he would remove the encryption if we sent $4,000 plus an extra $1000 for every week we delayed.’ Frank says that he guesses from the English that the blackmailer used he was Russian or Ukranian (the seat of this type of activity) and he eventually divulged a convoluted method of payment that involved dodgy international bank accounts and wire transfers.
‘We did track down three of their IP addresses to Israel but that doesn’t mean anything. The could have dummy addresses all over the place.’ Frank says that the school had many expert IT workers in and over the following weeks they slowly teased some of the encrypted information from the server and also slowly strung along the blackmailers in the hope that they could recover continued on page 3