10/23/2023 0 Comments Max headroom incident memesWe speak to you now in peace and wisdom as we have done to your brothers and sisters all over this, your planet Earth. For many years you have seen us as lights in the skies. “This is the voice of Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, speaking to you. The picture kept running while the audio cut out, and was replaced by a strange message… Nearly one decade to the day before the Max Headroom hack, a transmitter in the south of England was hacked during an early-evening news program. Is a cable, is it over IP? Does it make sense to try to get one of the points at which the branchs fork in the distribution of the signal and try to hijack that and become the source of authority?” HISTORY OF HIJACKING Especially if it’s geographically bounded and how do they get access to signal. Well, I guess the first thing you have to do is figure out what population you want to go after. “ how does one go about hijacking a television station? Sam was interviewed by Nate Nelson, our senior producer. I’m chief security officer for cyber reason and a visiting fellow at the national security Institute.” Either, a) the insider managed to perfectly cover their tracks, or b) hacking a television station like WGN wasn’t as difficult as experts assumed it was. How could this be? Well, there were one of two possible answers. It’s part of the reason why, immediately following the breach, WGN employees scoured the building for a malicious insider, assuming that only someone with direct access to their tech could’ve pulled off such a feat. Logically you might assume that hacking a television station of such scale–with all the expensive infrastructure used to support it–would be highly costly and difficult. In other words, this was not trivial machinery. They broadcast their signal about seven miles to an antenna atop the John Hancock building–a 100-story skyscraper in the very heart of the city–where every day, 24 hours a day, it beamed to tens of thousands of homes in the area. You and I can’t simply go out and start a television station like we could start a website–the technological, regulatory and financial barriers to doing so are simply too high.įor example: WGN-TV studios were located in the north of Chicago’s metro area. Television, on the other hand, is a highly-controlled, centralized business. It is because the internet is so free and open that the barriers to break it can often be so low. HOW TO HIJACK A TV SIGNALĭepending on the target, hacking a website can be almost as cheap as starting one. The show continues, as technicians behind the camera and at the studio, and tens of thousands of Chicago-area viewers, are left trying to figure out what the heck just happened. So what we’re gonna do is start over from the top.” “Actually, the computer that we have running our news from time to time took off and went wild. “Well, if you’re wondering what’s happened, so am I,” the anchor replies, giggling, a bit flustered. After 28 seconds off air, the 9:00 news finally comes back on. Station engineers, panicking, manage to shift their broadcast frequency. A loud, grating buzzing noise is all that can be heard. They’re nodding at the camera, maybe laughing, or trying to say something. They’re sitting in front of a slab of corrugated metal spinning one way then the other, back and forth, hypnotically. It’s somebody in a tan suit, wearing sunglasses over a mask of “Max Headroom” – a fictional AI character from an 80’s T.V series. They scramble.Īfter 15 seconds, a low-quality video appears on screen. In the WGN-TV control room in the north of the city, technicians are baffled. The screen is black for thousands of Chicago homes. He’s about to crush this poor quarterback when suddenly, without warning, the signal cuts out. Bears lineman Richard Dent comes rushing around his blocker, and opens his arms wide, heading straight for Long. Onscreen, Lions quarterback Chuck Long drops back into the pocket. Sports anchor Dan Roan is reviewing an easy 30-to-10 win of the 8-and-2 Chicago Bears over their hapless rivals, the 2-and-8 Detroit Lions. Channel 9 is running its 9 o’clock news hour. Today’s story begins on November 22nd, 1987, at 9:14 p.m. Welcome back to Malicious Life, in collaboration with Cybereason.
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