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:Accountability?

[Free the Cowards]

That's pretty much the whole idea of having a corporation.

Re:The Video Shows the Holy Grail of Sat Hacking

[Dun Malg]

Makes me think he could also dump the ASIC, something even in the heyday of DTV hacking, was never accomplished. You can't dump an ASIC--- that's the very reason they exist in this application. It's not code, it's an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. It's essentially an unknown array of logic gates. The best you can do it try to reverse engineer it, and short of an electron microscope, you probably couldn't.

Re:Motivation

[donweel]

Using a hacker of this caliber is a double edged sword. If you don't keep him busy and entertained he's going to start looking for something else to do.