Hacker denies using tool to break into Dish Network security

By Jim Carr
SC Magazine
April 25, 2008

… Tarnovsky, a frequent presenter at the Black Hat conferences and once known as "Big Gun," reportedly helped pirates decode the satellite signal of DirecTV in the 1990s. In March 2002, Vivendi Universal SA's Canal Plus, a satellite-TV operator in Europe, filed a lawsuit claiming that Tarnovsky helped pirates hack Canal Plus signals after joining NDS in 1997. He left NDS to start his own company, FlyLogic Engineering, in April 2007.

Tarnovsky's testimony focuses attention on the value of an enterprise's intellectual property and the importance of protecting it, Amena Ali, chief marketing officer at application security vendor Arxan, told SCMagazineUS.com.

"A company like Nagrastar undoubtedly deployed some security mechanism to make sure paying customers had access to the smart card, but they were not in-depth enough to defend against a reverse-engineering attack," she said.

"Nagrastar did not anticipate the hacker," Mike Dager, Arxan's chief executive officer and president, told SCMagazineUS.com. "You have to anticipate what a hacker will do, anticipate the techniques a hacker will use, and come up with a technology solution to thwart those types of attacks and techniques."

Application hardening tools such as encryption, binary source-code obfuscators, binary wrappers and the company's proprietary binary-code protection technology offer varying degrees of defense against hacking and reverse engineering, Dager said.

The NDS/Dish trial, being heard in southern California because Tarnovsky and NDS are located there, is expected to continue for several weeks.

EchoStar told SCMagazineUS.com that it was not commenting on the lawsuit.