Black Sunday Hack

(via Coding Horror)

This is just too good - even though it's quite dated by internet standards (2001).

It's the deliciously evil story of a hacking exploit of DirectTV - and the coding catfight that ensued.

It all begins with a batch of DirectTV smart cards...

One of the original smart cards, entitled 'H' cards for Hughes, had design flaws which were discovered by the hacking community. These flaws enabled the extremely bright hacking community to reverse engineer their design, and to create smart card writers. 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.

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 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.

It just gets better from there, Read on.