Broadcast signal intrusion
[2] On November 26, 1977, an audio message, purporting to come from outer space and conveyed by an individual named 'Vrillon' of the 'Ashtar Galactic Command', was broadcast during an ITN news bulletin on Southern Television in the United Kingdom.
At their sentencing, the judge noted their prize-winning work in the Polish scientific community and gave each of them probation and a fine of the equivalent of US$100 each (or 3,000,000 old złoty, 300 PLN in today's currency).
[5] At 12:32 a.m. Eastern Time on April 27, 1986, HBO (Home Box Office) had its satellite signal feed from its operations center on Long Island in Hauppauge, New York interrupted by a man calling himself "Captain Midnight".
[7] Haynie, who pleaded his innocence,[8] was the first person convicted under a new federal law which had made satellite hacking a felony following the Captain Midnight incident.
The jamming signal left behind subtle technical clues that were captured on a VHS recording made at the Playboy Channel's uplink at the time of the event – like finding "fingerprints" in the video.
Next came PBS affiliate WTTW, where the man was seen and heard uttering garbled remarks before dropping his pants, partially exposing his buttocks, and was then spanked with a flyswatter by a woman wearing a French maid costume before normal programming resumed.
On February 16, 2002, television signals in the Chinese city of Anshan were briefly hijacked by members of the Falun Gong religious movement in order to clarify the events of the Tiananmen Square self-immolation incident of the previous year.
One spot showed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with crosshairs superimposed on his image followed by three gunshots and a voice saying "Your day is coming" and shots of the Israeli Air Force destroying targets in Lebanon.
[23] On February 11, 2013, Great Falls, Montana, CBS affiliate KRTV had their Emergency Alert System hijacked with an audible message warning viewers that "the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living.
[34] Borgen said in a statement that the former employee, 36-year-old Harold William Lindgren of Marquette, suffered mental health issues and planned his own revenge to the station by swiping a steel wool scouring pad from his wife's sink and drove thirty five miles south to Lathrop on the evening of September 30, before climbing a fence around the transmitter and used a ball-point pen before stuffing the pad into a pipe of the relay equipment the following evening, calling the interruption "a diabolical plot".
Leonardo Garcia of the Radio Control Office hypothesized that the culprit was either misusing television equipment or was an "amateur electronic buff", and wryly observed, "Whoever he is, he must be a good Catholic.
The station's manager, L.A. Sturdivant, released a statement explaining that the broadcast intrusion was triggered by accident rather than deliberately planned, and was being "treated as a serious matter.
[46] On January 4, 2000, a broadcast of the children's television series Teletubbies on GMA Network in the Philippines was replaced by a still photo of actress Rosanna Roces for several seconds.
A spokesman for Seven later denied that the transmission was a prank or a security breach and claimed that the repeated line was part of the original broadcast and said, "Jesus Christ, one of the Nazarenes", although there is hardly any similarity between the two phrases.
A subsequent investigation by independent researchers revealed that the invading transmission was actually from a videotaped news broadcast of a civilian truck being ambushed in the Iraq War on September 20, 2005.
[50] Parent company Ion Media Networks conducted a rigorous investigation into what they called "an intolerable act of human sabotage", and shortly thereafter, announced that the employee found to be responsible had been fired, threatening further legal action.
[51] On June 17, 2007, an intrusion incident occurred on Czech Television's Sunday morning program Panorama, which shows panoramic shots of Prague and various locations across the country, especially mountain resorts.
One of the cameras, located in Černý Důl in the Giant Mountains, had been tampered with on-site and its video stream was replaced with the hackers' own, which contained CGI of a small nuclear explosion in the local landscape, ending in white noise.
The incident was deemed a genuine signal intrusion by various websites but has since been confirmed to be the result of an older HDTV encoder malfunctioning in the early morning hours and going undetected.
[54] During the 2014 Gaza War, Hamas hacked Channel 10 (Israel) with messages threatening Israelis to stay longer in the bomb shelters and showing pictures of the wounded Gazans.
With love, a loyal viewer.”[62]On April 27, 1983, a Cox Cable headend in Santa Barbara, California, replaced the video feed of KNXT's Channel 2 Eyewitness News with softcore pornography for 15 minutes, while audio of the newscast was still presented throughout its entirety.
[68] Later that October, Gonzalez pleaded guilty to two counts of computer tampering and was sentenced to three years of probation, as well as a $1,000 fine to the Arizona attorney general's anti-racketeering fund.
[69] In the morning hours of March 16, 2010, Raleigh area Time Warner Cable's transmission from both Kids and Kids Preschool On Demand channels in the Research Triangle counties of Johnston, Wake, Wayne, and Wilson in North Carolina (including the cities of Raleigh and Goldsboro) was replaced by Playboy TV for approximately two hours, while other TWC cable systems in the area outside the four counties only revealed a black screen.
An executive from TWC stated to local news station WRAL that it "was a technical malfunction that caused the wrong previews to be shown" on their kids' on-demand channels.
[70] On April 20, 2012, three minutes of a gay pornographic film was broadcast during a morning news show on the Channel Zero-owned independent station CHCH-DT in Hamilton, Ontario, for Shaw Cable viewers.
[73] On March 11, 2016, private satellite dish owners in Israel watching HaAh HaGadol (the Israeli version of Big Brother) on Channel 2 had their show interrupted by propaganda videos from Hamas.
[76] The Federal Bureau of Investigation made major headlines on November 24, 1943 after reporting a 90-second interruption of a Nazi man speaking rapidly over a CBS Radio program on WOKO-AM in Albany, New York.
The hackers targeted individual Barix audio streaming devices that were findable on the search engine Shodan, logged into them, and locked out the owners while airing the podcast.
A spokesperson for Bauer Media Group, Mix Megapol's owners, stated that "somebody interfered with our frequency using a pirate transmitter" and that they would contact the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority.
[81][82] During the 2020 United States presidential election, the radio station WWEI in Springfield, Massachusetts, was hijacked and interrupted with a voice that said, "Don't be a chump, vote for Trump.
