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.
Wait, so I can just damage other people’s property?!
Sure you can, outside of a few specific carve outs it’s a civil matter… Meaning it takes money to fight money behind it