Hired Hacker Looks Bad For Smart Card Company

from the set-up-or-hacking-as-a-business-model? dept

Over the past year there have been a bunch of stories about accusations that a maker of smart cards for decoding satellite TV had been helping pirates crack their competitors’ codes. The Wall Street Journal, reprinted by MSNBC, has an interesting background story on the company, and the fact that they hired a famed hacker of smart cards a few years back, who is now the center of that investigation. The whole thing certainly sounds fishy. While the guy and the company both claim that he joined the company to “go legit”, the company still had him hanging out with other hackers (under various aliases) to keep tabs on what was happening in that space. He even used a fake name at work, so that no one would know that he was a guy famous for cracking smart cards.


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