Satellite TV Hacker Tells His Story

Wired is running a story about Christopher Tarnovsky, the man who was accused of working for NDS, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to sabotage a competitor's satellite TV system. Wired had a chance to speak with Tarnovsky and get his description of how the smart-card hacking war developed. Quoting: "Tarnovsky, who was known online as 'Big Gun,' says Ereiser offered him $20,000 to fix cards that were killed by ECMs, and he agreed. Each time NDS created a countermeasure, Tarnovsky would analyze the code and find a way to circumvent the countermeasure. He did it while working full-time as a software engineer for a semiconductor company in Massachusetts. 'I'd be at work and I'd check the IRC (channel) to see if they'd launched their Thursday countermeasure yet,' he says. 'It was like a chess game for me. I couldn't wait for them to do a countermeasure because I would counter it in minutes.' It wasn't long before NDS came courting. Tarnovsky had a contact at the company to whom he'd begun passing information about holes in its software, even supplying patches to fix them."

Comments

Re:Who wants to track down which company

[az1324]

Yeah cause there's no tech schools there or anything.

Now we need the max headroom video Pirate to tell

[Joe The Dragon]

Now we need the max headroom video Pirate to tell his story.

Shocking!

[neokushan]

I was shocked when I read TFA and found that it didn't easily summarise as "I spent ages hacking the system, then got bored because there was nothing worth watching".

Re:Some lawyer - what's the theory on airwaves?

[NotQuiteReal]

Heh, I would use a scientific argument...

Well, your honor, I thought I was working on a SETI project, you know, searching for ET. Damn if I didn't discover it was just HBO, not aliens, after all.

Re:The Video Shows the Holy Grail of Sat Hacking

[liquidf]

don't forget about the flux capacitor, you insensitive clod!

Re:Some lawyer - what's the theory on airwaves?

[jeiler]

'Cause it's piracy, matey. Signed, L. J. Silver, Esq.

Re:uh, this is a PR fluff piece

[Arimus]

The only moral of the story here is that an arrogant, ethics-free mercenary with access to any tool he pleases is given way too much admiration in the twenty first century.

Just like a lawyer or a politician then (though in the case of the Which Blair Project he meets both lawyer and politician requirements, and depending on your politicial views probably ethics free, and certainly arrogant.

Re:OLD

[andrewa]

This was a good story when I read it last year too. This type of comment was good when I read it 10 years ago too.

Re:Motivation

[LordVader717]

Give him some Porn.