

Revisiting the Black Sunday Hack (2008) - olalonde
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack.html

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mikestew
Way back in the late 90s I had DirecTV and lived in a place that would fry
anything with a phone jack if it wasn't unplugged during a thunderstorm.
Lightening got the DTV box's phone circuitry (the rest of box worked fine)
when we weren't home, and I didn't want to buy a new one. A buddy showed me
how to hack the card with a reader/writer, and I was into the scene for a
while (I continued to pay DTV their money each month; this was a hardware fix,
not payment avoidance). It was fun working on something at such a low level.
Far smarter folks than me were doing the actual hacks, but I had a grasp of
what was going on. Very simplistically, the card acted like the cable TV
filters on the side of your house, deciding what the box would and would not
decode for your viewing pleasure.

By the time Black Sunday rolled around, I had purchased a new box and gone
"legit". But I did read about it, and was impressed by a very cleverly put
together and well-timed hack to make all of those cards go _poof_. What TFA
doesn't mention, and maybe I'm remembering it wrong, was that it was the hacks
themselves that did the cards in. DTV couldn't rely on their code to be there,
since the hacks modified it. So DTV anticipated what the hacks would be,
waited for them all to be in place, then pulled the trigger. IOW, the hackers
indirectly did it to themselves.

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sbierwagen
(2008)

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mikestew
The article is from 2008, the actual event goes back to 2001.

