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.

13 points

I guess these hackers really enjoy the rich, succulent tastes of Das Boot.

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5 points

Taste of the boat?

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4 points

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.

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9 points

This is not the way.

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10 points
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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.

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3 points

You don’t even need a VPN to use a different DNS server.

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2 points
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Yeah for sure. Maybe even something as simple as setting the network DNS to Quad9

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14 points

what kind of narc behaviour is this

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31 points

There’s white, gray and black hat… and then you have these guys, piss yellow hats.

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