SPACE ROGUE

About eight years ago a media story broke about how some “hackers” took over a British Ministry of Defense Satellite and were holding it for ransom. Anyone who knew anything about Command and Control systems for satellites knew this would be almost impossible especially for a military satellite. That didn’t stop Newsbytes, Yahoo News, ZDNet, even Reuters from running the story and sensationalizing the crap out of it. None of the ‘legitimate’ media questioned the story at all. They just reran the original Sunday Business story. The only website that I know of that questioned the story at the time was The Hacker News Network.. It was the questioning of that story that prompted Brock Meeks of MSNBC to label HNN as “the voice of reason”. As it turned out no confirmation of the original story was ever obtained, the Ministry of Defense flat out denied the event ever took place and the Sunday Business never revealed where the story came from.
So? Big deal? What’s the point of this walk down memory lane? Well, here it is eight years later and the same crappy media is republishing the same bullshit story as truth and fact. Evidently Corinne Iozzio over at PC Magazine, nor her (his?) editors can be bothered to do basic journalism, simple research or check facts. No, can’t let facts get in the way of a good headline and increased page views and ad impressions. So now this supposed ‘hack’ that as far as I can tell never actually happened, is the second most mysterious unsolved cyber crime. I suppose, on the Internet, if you repeat something enough times it magically turns into fact?

For reference here are the old HNN pages from March 1, 1999 and March 2, 1999. Unfortunately the chrome is gone and none of the links work anymore but the content is unchanged.

UPDATE: Thanks to Google’s 10th Anniversary Archive from 2001 and the Internet Archive a few quick searches help to confirm that the original story was fake. (Hey, Corinne, this took me all of about ten minutes.)

ZDNet – via Internet Archive “Our Satellites are Hack Proof”
Geek.com – via Internet Archive “Satellite hack is impossible, says UK”
Reuters Retraction – via Shmoo.com “British Defense Ministry Dismisses Hacker Report”

So The Last HOPE is over and while I am still here in New York (the reason why I’ll save for another day) I have been contemplating the events of the weekend. All in all I thought the con ran extremely well which is a bit unusual in my experience for HOPE. While there were a few excellent talks that I mentioned in my previous post I found many of the talks to be… elementary. But hacker cons are sooo much more than just the talks and presentations, they are time to reconnect with old friends, friends you only see at cons and online. Time to drink bears and retel old war^h^h^h hacking stories. The fact that this is the “Last” HOPE and that 2600 the book has just been released I have been reflecting on my own travels through this underground maze. From my first real introduction to hacker culture at HoHo Con ‘92 held in Houston Texas to the ‘last’ Pump con in Philadelphia just a few years ago. In ‘92 the internet did exist but getting access to it was a bit more difficult. I remember making a modem call from my HP95LX from my hotel room to post news from HoHo con back on the hometown BBS. By the time of the first HOPE in 1995 the Internet was much more prolific but still new and shiny. The First HOPE captured that excitment of newness and the possibilities that it presented. Here at The Last HOPE people are live twittering (tweeting?), disecting talks and heckling in real time from behind keyboards. Change is of course inevitable but I think what I am seing here is a change in the culture itself. Sure parents are now bringing their kids to the same cons they snuck out of the house to go to, but I think it is more than just the core population growing older. There is a definite shift in how people interact and react to each other and technology. I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on it but I have been feeling it all weekend. Much like the first HOPE opened a new chapter I got the feeling that this last HOPE is closing a chapter in hacker history and culture. It makes me wonder what comes next?

P.S. Rumour has it that the Hotel Pennsylvania will not be torn down due to the poor economy. In which case, if it is still standing, the next HOPE will be in 2010. (Eternal HOPE?, HOPE Pheonix?). Personally I think if this con continues they should come up with a new name. The era of HOPE is over.

After you attend more than a half dozen or so hacker cons you start to realize several recurring themes amoung presentation topics. Topics such as Freedom of Information Act requests, hacker spaces, or hacker history have been done several times at various cons. The Last Hope is no different as these topics have recurred here as well. The difference here is that the presentors of these topics have each taken a different more interesting slant and have actually presented new and useful information. The FOIA talk has actually motivated me to file a few requests myself. The Hacker Spaces presenation actually broke down many of the problems that we ran into at the L0pht and even some we didn’t have and actually codified them all with solutions creating almost a blueprint for anyone wanting to create thier own hacker space. And Sketch Cow’s talk on hacker history makes you stop and think when you realize that future historians may only have major media sources such as hollywood movies and copies of Newsweek to try to understand what all hacker culture was all about.

Looking forward today to talks on Phone Phreaking History, Copying High Security Keys, Honeypots for the Home User, and the premier of Hackateer.

Can’t be here and are missing all the action? Check out the Live twitter feed and the Flickr stream.

I’m sitting on the floor of the eighteenth level of the Hotel Pennsylvania at The Last HOPElistening to Karsten Nohl talk about the (Im)possibility of Hardware Obfuscation as he discuss tracing connections in integrated chip design. Heady stuff. Already ran into Lady Ada from AdaFruit Industries and Road Dancer from the old (defunct?) HDF.

So far it is a very interesting crowd mix, there are your standard hacker types but here also seem to be a lot of ‘normal’ people as well. The crowd seems sedate but there is a certain electric charge in the air present at all hacker cons. The real fun will come later tonight as people absorb all the new information presented at the talks and start to mix it up amongst themselves. Good stuff.

Check my flickr stream for pictures.