DirecTV in the News

Satellite TV Cracks Down on Hackers

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - January 26, 2000 - After playing a cat-and-mouse game for years with hackers who steal its signal to get scores of free channels, the nation's leading satellite TV service struck back with an electronic attack so vicious the pirates are calling it "Black Sunday."

DirecTV satellites delivered a special signal to its millions of receiver boxes in homes across North America last Sunday, telling the system to shut down the unauthorized access cards that pirates use to capture DirecTV gratis.

The withering electronic countermeasure (ECM) forced thousands of satellite TV pirates to face the prospect of pulling out old-fashioned antennas to watch the Super Bowl.

Writing the code to make DirecTV vulnerable once again to pirating could take weeks, if it's at all possible, several hacker Web sites reported.

"What I'm telling my customers is that it never hurt anyone to get out the rabbit ears or play with the kids for a few days," a Canadian access card dealer known online as "DLCT" said in an e-mail interview.

Pirates could, of course, buy a legitimate satellite TV subscription, which costs anywhere from $22 to $250 a month after an initial outlay of around $150.

DirecTV officials acknowledge that the company uses electronic countermeasures, a tool more typically employed in modern warfare.

But they refused to specifically confirm or deny Black Sunday.

"Satellite TV is really growing in popularity, and we knew that if there is a group of engineers who can design this system, there'd be another group that will hack this system," said Bob Marsocci, a spokesman for El Segundo, Calif.-based DirecTV.

With millions of dollars in potential revenue at stake, the company "takes satellite signal theft very seriously," he said. "We have an Office of Signal Integrity that works very closely with federal and state authorities."

Ever since DirecTV began six years ago, hackers have persistently figured out how to get around paying for it.

Here's how: They buy a set-top receiver from a former subscriber or a gray-market dealer over the Internet.

Each receiver is equipped with an access card, a smart card with an embedded microchip, that essentially runs the system.

The card is programmed with a unique code, which lets the receiver take from the DirecTV satellite signal only the channels that the subscriber has paid for, and leaves the rest scrambled.

Hackers have figured out ways to program cards that grant the receiver access to everything - like pay-per-view movies and sports events and other premium services. This is especially popular in Canada, where DirecTV is not licensed to provide service, and where selling hacked access cards and equipment is not a crime.

Every so often, DirecTV sends a message in its signal ordering the set-top receiver to alter the programming in hacked cards, confusing them and shutting them down. Hackers parried by making the cards "read only," meaning no new data could be encoded on them.

Then, according to the hacking community, DirecTV gradually planted a "logic bomb in the access cards last year. It sent data a few bytes at a time to the set-top receivers that reprogrammed them so that they would not accept cards that had not also been reprogrammed.

That forced hackers to make the cards "writeable" again.

On Sunday, DirecTV delivered the digital coup de grace, permanently disabling the cards.

"They actually sent down multiple ECMs at once to make sure any and all hacked cards could be targeted," said "DeeEssEss," the creator and operator of HackHU.com and DishNetHack.com, two Internet sites dedicated to the shadowy techno-wizards who pirate DirecTV and its rival EchoStar Communications.

DirecTV has about 9.5 million subscribers in the United States, and EchoStar's DISH Network counts 4.5 million.

DeeEssEss estimates 200,000 pirates were sent reeling by Sunday's attack.

"This latest one was a very good deterrent," DeeEssEss said in an e-mail interview. "The more equipment people have to buy for new fixes, the less they will want to hack. Imagine you bought a card and programmer last week for around $350 total. This week, your card is dead."

Immediately following the attack, hacker community leaders issued pleas for patience. They said the brightest engineers were working on solutions.

And so the game continues.

"This is the way it always is with security hackers, and they're always leapfrogging each other," said Josh Bernoff, a TV industry analyst with Forrester Research.

Just this Wednesday, Arizona authorities arrested a former law officer and six other people for allegedly operating a satellite television hacking business. Charges are also pending against four other people.

The thievery is nothing new. Cable TV providers have dealt for years with a similar problem - boxes sold in the black market that unscramble the encrypted cable programming signals.

So far, most law enforcement actions have targeted manufacturers, dealers and distributors - not the end-users.

Marsocci said DirecTV was preparing a project to educate consumers on the seriousness of signal theft.

"Most people would walk into a neighbor's home, and say, `Hey look, I get the satellite service for free' and they're most proud of it," Marsocci said. "But it's the same thing as saying, 'Hey, I just shoplifted this,' or `stole a car."'

Related news: Big Fines for DirecTV Pirates