TSC Trusted Advisors’ Blog

Super Bowl Cable Hack

So, you’re watching the Super Bowl. You have a houseful of kids and friends, all watching your brand-new 60” flat screen. It’s a tight game and everyone is glued to the set. With less than 3 minutes left, Arizona scores a touchdown. Suddenly the picture changes – you’re watching a woman unzip some guy’s fly. You scramble for the remote while your guests gasp and your little girl says, ‘Daddy, is that what always happens after a touchdown?’

Great. You have a lot of explaining to do to your mother-in-law, and Tucson’s KVOA and Comcast have a lot of explaining to do to everyone paying for their signal. The cable infrastructure is complicated, it’s not that we don’t understand that. But, somewhere the cable company left a seam in their security, and someone found it. Was it an inside job? Maybe, but maybe they got hacked. If it wasn’t a hack, why porn? The guy who did it wanted to shock you, and he succeeded.

As an industry, we have a set of things that we do, and tell everyone else to do, to protect themselves. Sometimes bad things happen because those things weren’t followed. Sometimes bad things happen because our standards are inadequate or obsolete. We need to do better. We need to do a LOT better. As all of our systems become networked, a seam in one place can hurt a lot of people and a lot of other systems. No one should get porn instead of the final three minutes of the Super Bowl.