Revisiting the Black Sunday Hack

codinghorror.com

23 points·bdfh42··6 comments

To those who laugh off DRM as something that can't work, please note: even with a large, motivated, well-equipped community of attackers lined up against it, the current DTV cards have remained unbroken for years and years.

for the first time, they could see a cunning mind at work on the other side.

I wonder if "hackers" actually think such things. The DirecTV network itself is, of course, a million times more magnificent and "cunning" than any of the pissy little exploits against it.

They absolutely did think those things. They even had a name for "the cunning mind": "Dave".

And, not to argue whether DirecTV is more magnificent than whatever, but the attacks on it were neither "pissy" nor "little". They were more advanced than most of what we see on general purpose architectures.

They were more advanced than most of...

Point missed. Were they more advanced than a global satellite network? There is simply comparison whatsoever. Exploiting a system is never as significant as creating a system.

That may well be true in DTV's case --- a point I acknowledged already --- but it's not true in security at large. Breaking an existing well-regarded block cipher, for instance, is far more significant than simply creating a new one.

Interesting article. Basically, they hired one of the hacker in order to win the electronic warfare (e-war) or cause major damage against the pirated DirecTV cards. After DirecTV destroyed 100,000 smart cards in one evening, "for the first time, they could see a cunning mind at work on the other side."

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