CMU School of Drama


Thursday, April 04, 2024

How to hack the Jacksonville Jaguars’ jumbotron (and end up in jail for 220 years)

Ars Technica: Where had the command come from? An Abekas Mira video control server known as MIRA9120. The Abekas Mira was meant to help in the production and display of instant replay video to be shown in-stadium on the massive jumbotron, but this particular server had been either decommissioned or kept on hand as a spare. In any event, the team thought the server was in storage. But when they went looking, MIRA9120 turned out to be sitting in the main server room, installed on a rack just beside the active Abekas Mira servers.

2 comments:

Claire M. said...

This article really took a turn I was not expecting. It started out as simply a computer mystery, but got into some really dark waters. I think the lesson to take away from this article is to always regularly check your systems for any backdoors or things that employees may have left. Something as simple as someone still signed into a media server on a laptop can wind up compromising a huge business, as there's simply too many ports of entry. Another thing that someone could do to minimize their risk of being hacked is to always change passwords regularly, uninstall ALL apps or programs you don't recognize, and to make sure that your internet traffic is encrypted and secure. Cyber security is really interesting to me, and its fascinating that what this media outlet considers as a "hack," is really just a very messed up man using a common software he installed.

Owen Sheehan said...

This article took a turn I didn't expect at all, and honestly this is a really sad story in the end. I hate being constantly reminded of how terrible the human race can be. While I am glad this initially innocuous raid revealed something much worse than the original crime. In the end though, this is just one example of how seemingly random acts of crime can lead to a much bigger case. Also the fact that this guy did nothing to obfuscate what he was doing is a clear case that he had no sense of self preservation what so ever. Like the fact that he used the dark web, which reroutes your traffic through multiple different servers, but couldn't even use a VPN is astonishing.