What happened so far?
The forums and news sites are again full of coverage about a hack of the german Pay-TV channel Premiere (forthcoming name: Sky Germany). As we already stated in april, 2009 this is a hoax. There are no evidences or proofs whatsoever. Anyway you’d better read on, why we believe searching for a hack is useless.
What we found out
Reliable sources from the scene tell there is no hack (besides the community based sharing approaches).
We strongly recommend to not waste your time searching the net for hacks for german Pay-TV. Search time is your precious life time. Hacking Nagra or Videoguard is a lot more difficult than hacking was in the old days ten years ago. Nowadays hacking requires equipment and tools, and people who know how to run those tools. We strongly recommend to watch this video (scroll page down) we found.
Murdoch’s NDS vs. Kudelski’s Nagravision
Nagravision belongs to Kudelski and NDS Videoguard belongs to Murdoch. We got a strange situation here in Germany, as Premiere/Sky now belongs to Murdoch aswell.
So it takes no genius to see that it is unlikely that Kudelski’s contracts with Premiere/Sky will be prolonged after 2012. We would not wonder if a working hack for Nagravision will be released in 2010 – almost some months before the next scheduled negotiations between Kudelski and Premiere/Sky.
What we think
We could imagine some talented people are working on it, but anyway we don’t believe they made it yet. And yes they could be from the Ukraine, from Russia, but they could also be from Spain, Austria, France or even from Germany. All those information are much too vague.
The only thing we really know (from the past) is the market penetration strategies of Rupert Murdoch’s companies (and Premiere/Sky belongs to Murdoch aswell). Murdoch is running television companies around the globe, and this is a multi-billion dollar business for him. We really think: in case there is a hack, those former Mossad guys working for Murdoch’s NDS crypto company will know that a lot earlier than anyone else. Simply because they get paid for knowing that. And they know how to know things earlier than others. Those guys will try almost everything to stop a hack from getting public.
The romantic times when Leo Kirch was running Premiere in Germany with a BetaCrypt (Irdeto) system that could be cracked by teenagers are long over. And eventually you’d better watch Arte-TV anyway :-)