This Article was downloaded from the Unet by Dr. Strangelove. If anyone knows anything more about Captain Midnight, let me know; I would like to find this guy. I can be contacted on the Matrix, 415-922-2008 Subject: HBO gets Hacked:: We Interrupt This Program ... for a Viewer Protest. From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow To: videotech@SEISMO.CSS.GOV, telecom@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Cc: neumann@SRI-CSL.ARPA, shadow@AIM.RUTGERS.EDU NEW YORK (AP) - A video hacker calling himself ''Captain Midnight'' startled cable television viewers from Maine to the Plains early Sunday when he interrupted a movie on Home Box Office with a printed message protesting HBO's scrambling of its satellite-to-earth TV signals. ''It's a criminal, willful interference of a government-licensed satellite broadcast,'' fumed David Pritchard, an HBO vice president, who said the cable system had received sabotage threats in recent months. Pritchard said HBO planned to report the incident to the Federal Communications Commission. ''It's kind of like terrorism of the airwaves,'' said Greg Mahany, who was watching in Middletown, Ohio, when the message interrupted ''The Falcon and The Snowman.'' The message, printed in white letters on a color-bar test pattern background, read: ''Goodevening HBO from Captain Midnight. $12.95 a month? No way! (Showtime-Movie Channel Beware.)'' Mahany said that at first the picture flipped back and forth between the message and the movie, making it seem like ''HBO was trying to get its signal back. ... It looked like a fight for control of the microwave beam.'' The message appeared at 12:30 a.m., Eastern time, and remained on the air about five minutes. It was seen in the eastern two-thirds of the nation, which accounts for more than half of HBO's 14.6 million subscribing households. Pritchard said the hacker, apparently with the use of a satellite dish and a powerful transmitter, effectively replaced HBO's signal with his own. For some reason - possibly because Captain Midnight's signal was better-timed or more powerful - HBO's satellite received the hacker's signal instead of HBO's and beamed it down to HBO's earth relay stations. Sunday's intrusion was immediately noticed at HBO's communications center in Hauppauge, N.Y., but it was not clear whether the hacker ended his own message or was forced off by HBO. Pritchard said HBO would have no comment on that. ''We have implemented some technical remedies, and we're pursuing others,'' he said. ''This represents a clear danger to every satellite user.'' Pritchard said action like Sunday morning's had been threatened in letters to HBO and in magazines read by dish owners. ''We'd been threatened for the last four or five months with something like this if we didn't reconsider our plan to scramble,'' he said. ''They said they'd do something. They didn't say what.'' The HBO cable signal is scrambled to prevent reception in homes wired for cable television but not equipped with an HBO converter. Until earlier this year, satellite dish owners were able to intercept the unscrambled signal HBO bounces off satellites to the earth stations that relay the signal via cable. In January, however, HBO began scrambling all its satellite-to-earth signals. HBO told dish owners who had been watching for free they would have to buy a descrambler for $395 and pay $12.95 a month. Another leading pay cable service, Showtime, announced plans for a similar system. Pritchard said about 6,000 dish owners put down the cash for the decoder and signed up for HBO or its sister service, Cinemax. But the proposal has been unpopular with others. ''They say things like, 'The airwaves are free,' and 'They (HBO) are using government satellites that our taxes pay for,''' Pritchard said. Pritchard said HBO's programs are its property, and it leases space from privately owned satellites. Date: Sun, 27 Apr 1986 22:39 MDT From: "Frank J. Wancho" To: "the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow" Cc: neumann@SRI-CSL.ARPA, [...] Subject: HBO gets Hacked:: We Interrupt This Program ... for a Viewer Protest. Until earlier this year, satellite dish owners were able to intercept the unscrambled signal HBO bounces off satellites to the earth stations that relay the signal via cable. It is interesting to note that while protective "alledgedly" and similar words are freely sprinkled in newsprint, the writer of the above chose "intercept" over "receive". The word "intercept" implies "theft", a criminal act. That "intercept" was unmodified and not a quote implies the allegation was accepted as fact proven in court. Is this indeed the case, or simply the viewpoint held by the programming services? If the latter, then it was inappropriate and perhaps biased to use "intercept". Just asking... --Frank Date: Tue, 22 Apr 86 07:37:13 pst From: Neumann@SRI-CSL.ARPA Subject: Ball's contribution on Polaris and SDI (from Dave Parnas) To: RISKS@SRI-CSL.ARPA Dave Parnas is now on his way to Australia for almost two months, so please don't expect him to reply. But on his way out, he sent me this *--* Qmodem Capture File 06/05/86 20:27:54 *--* justified display of civil disobedience. I live in Pittsburgh, which has a (pathetic) cable company to which I subscribe, so I am not an aggrieved dish owner, but I sympathize with them. Why? Because cable program providers MUST factor in ONLY wired-in subscribers when signing contracts to buy programming (or else they are idiots) so the fringe viewers with discs (most often far from any cable company) have little or nothing to do with their financial situations. HBO's decision to scramble its signal to force people who cost HBO, or cable systems, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to "hook up" is ridiculous; at least disc owners should be given a hefty credit for their investment before having to buy a descrambler and pay monthly rates. Not being a lawyer, it also seems that scambling makes a mockery of the 1934 Communications Act, which prevents encoded transmissions over public channels. This sort of problem may prevent another medium -- videodiscs -- from fulfilling their promise of providing vast aounts of cheap information. Consider: a 12" videodisc can store up to 108,000 frames of information. What information? In the case of NASA, lots of planetary images. In the case of the National Gallery of Art, 1645 art works and a couple of movies. But what if a videodisc publisher wanted to provide a comprehensive collection of ALL major works of western art, 65 TIMES the number of art works provides on the NGA disc. As it stands, this would be impossible because each provider of art images would want a royalty for each disk (to pay costs, perhaps 1 cent per work per copy. But this would mean a $10,800 royalty PER DISC for all suppliers, which would make the disc completely unsalable, making a comprehensive history of art expert system all but impossible to develop because the costs could not be amortized. (If you think this is outlandish, consider that the Metropolitan Museum in New York wanted to charge the US Marine Corps $50 for the LOAN of a photograph of an artifact that the Marines wanted to include in their Bicentennial exhibit in Washington DC in 1976. The Marines, to their credit, declined to pay.) Some new paradigm will have to be worked out before mega-media will be acceptable both to information providers and consumers. Date: Mon, 28 Apr 86 21:51:15 edt From: mikemcl@nrl-csr (Mike McLaughlin) To: risks@sri-csl.ARPA Subject: HBO -- Hacked Briefly Overnight Overpowering a transmitter is essentially trivial. If HBO was scrambling its uplink, Captain Midnight's missive must have been similarly scrambled. Perhaps HBO's scramble algorithm is also trivial. Of course, if the uplink is in the clear, Captain Midnight merely needed brute force. Anyone know how or where the signal is scrambled? Or whether an HBO receiver set to unscramble will pass an in-the-clear signal? I realize that facts may set limits to the discussion. Regrettable. ------------------------------ Satellite transponders used by the cable TV industry to relay programs are "bent pipes", that is, they simply repeat whatever they hear. The M/A-Com scrambler equipment is all on the ground. However, the descramblers will switch to "pass through" mode if a nonscrambled signal is received. Therefore, when Captain Midnite sent his unencoded signal, the descramblers simply passed the signal straight through to the various cable systems. The transmitter power available on a satellite is very limited (5-10 watts). Even with a very large receiver dish, the raw carrier-to-noise ratio is far too low for acceptable picture quality if a linear modulation scheme (such as VSB AM, used for ordinary TV broadcasting) were used. Therefore, satellite TV transmissions are instead sent as wideband FM in a 40 MHz bandwidth. Since the baseband video signal is only 5 MHz wide, this results in a fairly large "FM improvement ratio" and a pronounced "capture" effect. Full receiver capture occurs at about a 10 dB S/N ratio, and this figure is essentially the same whether the "noise" is in fact thermal noise or another uplink signal. So for the purposes of fully overriding another uplink your signal must be about 10 dB stronger (10 times the power). The latest transponders are much more sensitive than those on the earliest C-band domestic satellites launched 12 years ago. Most of the 6 Ghz High Power Amplifiers (HPAs) in use at uplink stations are therefore capable of several kilowatts of RF output, but are actually operated at only several [Khundred watts. So Captain Midnite could have easily captured the HBO uplink if he had access to a "standard" uplink station (capable of several kilowatts into a 10 meter dish) or equivalent. I happened to turn on HBO in my Dayton, Ohio hotel room at about 1AM, half an hour after the incident occurred, and noticed lots of "sparklies" (FM noise) in the picture. At the time I grumbled something about having to pay $90/night for a hotel that couldn't even keep their dish pointed at the satellite, but I now suspect that the pirate was still on the air but that HBO had responded by cranking up the wick on their own transmitter. Because they were unable to run 10 dB above the pirate's power level, they were unable to fully recapture the transponder, hence the sparklies. (Can anyone else confirm seeing this, proving that my hotel wasn't in fact at fault?) Even though each transponder has a bandwidth of 40 MHz, it is separated by only 20 MHz from its neighbors. Alternating RF polarization is used to reduce "crosstalk" below the FM capture level. Polarization "diversity" isn't perfect, though, so it is possible in such a "power war" that the adjacent transponders could be interfered with, requiring *their* uplinks to compensate, which would in turn require *their* neighbors to do the same, and so on. So Captain Midnite could cause quite a bit of trouble for all the users of the satellite, not just HBO. Captain Midnite could have been anywhere within the Continental US, Southern Canada, Northern Mexico, the Gulf of Mexico, etc. In the worst case, it could be practically impossible to locate him. If he is caught, it will be either because he shoots off his mouth, arouses suspicion among his neighbors (or fellow workers, if a commercial uplink station), or transmits something (distinctive character generator fonts, etc) that gives him away. Only the NSA spooksats would be capable of locating him from his transmissions alone, and I suspect even they would require much on-air time to pinpoint the location accurately enough to begin an aerial search. Phil Karn ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 30 Apr 86 18:11:02 EDT From: Dan Franklin To: risks@sri-csl.arpa Subject: HBO hacking Re the interception of HBO's uplink by "Captain Midnight": I understand that the video scrambling is indeed pretty simple, consisting of reversing black and white on some "randomly-chosen" scan lines. It's easy to build a box that will undo this scrambling. The sound is much harder; it uses DES. In the accounts I read, Captain Midnight just put up a still video picture with no sound, which would make sense assuming that the uplink is encoded; he could easily encode his video but not his sound. Nicholas Spies seems to feel that the scrambling was purely an act of malice against individuals with dishes. Not so; according to a recent issue of Forbes, when HBO started scrambling, a number of CABLE TV OPERATORS they'd never heard of signed up for the decoders! If cable TV operators can charge their customers for HBO, why should they get it for free? I had some other comments about what the FCC Communications Act really says and what "public" means, but this is getting awfully far from Risks... "Telecom" and "poli-sci" are no doubt more appropriate. Dan Franklin (dan@bbn.com) [Thanks for the restraint. However, the relevance of the HBO case to RISKS is clear. Various risks exist -- but have been customarily ignored: easy free reception and spoofing without scrambling, video spoofing and denial of service even with scrambling. PGN] ------------------------------ This article was doenladed from the Unet by Dr. Strangelove.