A team of hackers from Brazil have taken first place in a hackathon organized by the country’s telecoms regulator. The challenge was to develop a solution to prevent non-approved ‘pirate’ set-top devices from functioning in people’s homes. The team say they were able to remotely transfer code which completely disabled a target device. Once implemented, “there will be a general failure in most of the irregular boxes in use,” the hacker predicted.
I guess these hackers really enjoy the rich, succulent tastes of Das Boot.
yeah I was assuming (incorrectly) that “the boot” would translate into German as “Das Boot”. Should’ve known better, or fact-checked myself. Anyway, I’m calling them out for being a bunch of bootlickers, which they are, until someone tells me the Brazilian government tortured their grandmas and pet dogs in order to force them to participate. Of which I wouldn’t be surprised, though.
Wait, so I can just damage other people’s property?!
There’s white, gray and black hat… and then you have these guys, piss yellow hats.
ensuring greater security and privacy for users
Don’t worry guys, they’re just concerned for the users security and privacy
Sounds like they would use DNS hijacking to trick the set top boxes into downloading malicious code that disables the device.
I wonder if something as simple as having a VPN active on the device or the network would mitigate this since you would be avoiding the ISP DNS.
