ChristopherTarnovsky
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Christopher Tarnovsky hacks Infineon's 'unhackable' chip, we prepare for false-advertising litigation
As it turns out, Infineon may have been a little bit... optimistic when it said its SLE66 CL PE was "unhackable" -- but only a little. The company should have put an asterisk next to the word, pointing to a disclaimer indicating something to the effect of: "Unless you have an electron microscope, small conductive needles to intercept the chip's internal circuitry, and the acid necessary to expose it." Those are some of the tools available to researcher Christopher Tarnovsky, who perpetrated the hack and presented his findings at the Black Hat DC Conference earlier this month. Initially, Infineon claimed what he'd done was impossible, but now has taken a step back and said "the risk is manageable, and you are just attacking one computer." We would tend to agree in this case, but Tarnovsky still deserves serious respect for this one. Nice work, Big Gun.
News Corp hired hacker to pirate DISH Network access cards
DISH Network and News Corp's satellite subsidiary NDS Group in California have been involved in an industrial espionage lawsuit for years now, but there was some big drama in court today: a hacker by the name of Christopher Tarnovsky (who used the handle "Big Gun," among others) testified that NDS hired him to create a device called "the stinger" that could reprogram DISH Network access cards. DISH lawyers say the plan was to flood the market with hacked cards, which would cost the satellite company $900M in revenue and repair costs. Unsurprisingly, NDS (which supplies DirecTV, among others), says that it hired Tarovsky only to reverse-engineer DISH's cards for competitive reasons, and Tarnovsky himself says that he believes "someone is trying to set him up." Sure, sure -- but no one's explaining why he was mailed mobile electronics from Canada with $20K in cash stashed inside, or why he was officially on the payroll of HarperCollins, a totally different NewCorp subsidiary, for more than 10 years. Sketchy sketchy -- and we thought satellite hacking was dead. Read - Reuters article about Tarnovsky's testimony Read - 2002 article about Tarnovsky and NDS
