Sunday, September 04, 2005

Hacking Satellite TV

Until last month many of the world's satellite tv companies relied on a cryptosysem called Nagravision. It has been broken for years, so recently DishNetwork sent all of its customers new access cards for their recievers. These access cards contained new circuits capable of decoding a new and (supposedly) more secure encryption system called Nagravision2.

Several days ago a group of European hackers broke Nagravision2, and many of my friends across the world are now viewing all of DishNetworks' programming (including PPV movies, premium sports channels, etc.) for free.

I believe DishNetwork underestimated the inherent security difficulties in giving millions of its customers the cryptographic key (or rather a method to get the key via their access cards) and simultaneously expecting that their enemies would be unable to reverse engineer said key.

Anyway, Nagra2 is wide open for anyone who is interested. Go to mauisun's bulletin board for more information on this fiasco.

1 comment:

J. Willard Curtis said...

What kind of money-grubbing scum bag hires a rent-a-hacker to write a script that spams innocent blogs with bogus advertisements? Both the company and the script-kiddie who wrote this spider should be chained to a ruined building in New Orleans and left to rot in the toxic sewage there.