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NZSO 'horrified' by porn on its CD
07 October 2002
Police and Internal Affairs are investigating how song titles on a promotional CD for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra were replaced with excerpts from hard core pornographic texts.
Orchestra members were "horrified" by the incident, spokeswoman Hannah Evans said yesterday.
The orchestra was first alerted to the X-rated substitutions soon after the promotional CD was sent out to 8000 people as part of its marketing for the 2003 season.
Those who used some internet-based media players, such as the Realone player, to listen to the CD, which was fronted by NZSO musical director and conductor James Judd, found that when the track title listings came up they had been substituted by pornographic descriptions of sex acts.
"They were pretty disgusting - actually they were horrendous," Ms Evans said.
"We got phone calls from three or four people who wanted to tell us what had happened and make sure we knew about it. People never saw it as something that we would have done."
The orchestra contacted the CD's producer, Wellington-based Amstore, which traced the problem to an American media player database Gracenote.com.
It seemed the person responsible had used an internet media player to read the CD, had made the changes and had saved them on the database. This meant that whenever anyone else used a media player that was connected to that database the X-rated version was displayed.
Gracenote was able to determine the changes were made on September 24 three days before the orchestra was alerted. It removed the X-rated version from its database.
The person responsible for the substitutions had to have had a copy of the CD to have been able to make the changes. And as the orchestra had not posted the overseas copies yet, it had to be someone in New Zealand, Ms Evans said.
It was possible the changes were not done maliciously and the person had inadvertently made the changes. It was also possible the person had used a website designed to "pornalise" the information on the CD.
Complaints had been lodged with both Wellington police and Internal Affairs.
The orchestra had not discovered the problem themselves as their media player was not connected to the internet, Ms Evans said.
The orchestra had produced 10,000 copies of the CD, which had cost less than $10,000. Ms Evans said she did not believe the X-rated CD incident would cost them anything financially and did not think it had lost the orchestra any supporters.
"We really don't know whether it was malicious or if it was some school holiday prank by some techno whizz-kid."
Wellington internet security company Scientific Software and Systems said such "vandalism" security breaches were of growing concern to organisations.
Managing director Bill Tonkin said the real damage done in these situations was to an organisation's reputation.
"Forget the cost of downtime, of not being to access your network, while the (problem) is being fixed.
"The real problem companies are now grappling with are issues of bad publicity, loss of reputation and legal liability."
Mr Tonkin said there were hard lessons to be learned, despite the likelihood that the breach was not the NZSO's fault.
"There's no excuse. It's not bad luck, it's bad management. If your own site is (breached) it's a bad technical decision. If it's a once-removed site...it can be a bad management decision.
"You're only as secure as your least trusted relationships."
An Internal Affairs spokesman said the changed content "was referred to in the law" and might be considered objectionable if tested legally.
He said the department would assist the NZSO in trying to track down the offender.
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