One week before the Super Bowl, DirecTV launched a series of attacks against the hackers of their product. Last Sunday night, at 8:30 pm est, DirecTV fired their new gun.

It was still possible to bypass the protections and receive the programming, but DirecTV had not pulled the trigger of this new weapon. The hacking community responded, but cautiously, understanding that this new ability for DirecTV to apply more advanced logic in the receiver was a dangerous new weapon. In a masterful, planned, and orchestrated manner, DirecTV had updated the old and ailing technology. This dynamic program changed the entire way the older technology worked. Like a final piece of a puzzle allowing the entire picture, the final updates made all the useless bits of computer code join into a dynamic program, existing on the card itself. Not until the final batch of updates were sent through the stream did the hacking community understand DirecTV. The hacking community accommodated this in their software, applying these updates in their hacking software. The updates contained useless pieces of computer code that were then required to be present on the card in order to receive the transmission. Many postulated they were simply trying to annoy the community into submission. Never before had DirecTV sent 4 and 5 updates at a time, yet alone send these batches every week. While the hacking community was able to bypass these batches, they did not understand the reasoning behind them. It was apparent that DirecTV had lost this battle, relegating DirecTV to hunting down Web sites that discussed their product and using their legal team to sue and intimidate them into submission.įour months ago, however, DirecTV began sending several updates at a time, breaking their pattern.

'H' cards regularly sold on eBay for over $400.00. This was the status quo for almost two years. 10 or 15 minutes later, the hacking community would update the software to work around the latest fixes. Each month or so, DirecTV would send an update. DirecTV could only send updates to the cards, and then require the updates be present in order to receive video. The hacker community then designed software that trojanized the card, and removed the capability of the receivers to update the card. The hacking community replied with yet another piece of hardware, an 'unlooper,' that repaired the damage. DirecTV applied updates that looked for hacked cards, and then attempted to destroy the cards by writing updates that disabled them.

Every receiver was designed to 'apply' these updates when it received them to the cards.

DirecTV had built a mechanism into their system that allowed the updating of these smart cards through the satellite stream. The hackers could re-write their smart cards and receive all the channels, and unplug their phone lines leaving no way for DirecTV to track the abuse. Since the technology of satellite television is broadcast only, meaning you cannot send information TO the satellite, the system requires a phone line to communicate with DirecTV. The writers enabled the hackers to read and write to the smart card, and allowed them to change their subscription model to receive all the channels. These flaws enabled the extremely bright hacking community to reverse engineer their design, and to create smart card writers. One of the original smart cards, entitled 'H' cards for Hughes, had design flaws which were discovered by the hacking community. I can see why they quoted so extensively it'd be difficult to improve on the unusually succinct, well written summary provided by Pat from Belch: Since the original 2001 Slashdot article I read on this is 99.9% quote, I'm going to do the same. One of the most impressive hacks I've ever read about has to be the Black Sunday kill.

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