Trial Begins on Dish Hacker Allegations Against NDS
The trial into Dish Networks’ claims that NDS hired hackers to crack its conditional access system got under way with opening arguments Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Dish, which filed suit in 2002, has accused NDS of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and federal RICO laws in seeking to get the ROM and EEPROM codes for the conditional access cards. The codes were used in cards made for Dish by Kudelski Group’s NagraStar.
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The case will rest on Dish’s allegations that after NDS failed in 1998 to get EchoStar to switch access suppliers, it sought to hire “the worst and most well-known satellite pirates and hackers in the world” to get control over the “compromising” of its and competitor’s products, the suit said. NDS believed that, if it controlled the hackers and breaks in the security system, its product “would appear superior” in the conditional access market, Dish said. At the time, NDS was supplying DirecTV with a conditional access system that was “widely hacked and pirated,” Dish said.
If it put legal pressure on satellite pirates, NDS believed it could hire the hackers, Christopher Tarnovsky and Oliver Kommerling, EchoStar said. Kommerling later helped NDS get the ROM and EEPROM codes and keys from Dish and other competitors, including Canal Plus, Dish said. NDS then worked with Tarnovsky and another pirate, Allen Menard, to set up a dealer network to “traffic and distribute” reprogrammed and pirated Dish cards, the company said. NDS later released to “the pirating community” procedures needed to hack the NagraStar conditional access cards in an effort “to destroy” its “only viable competitor,” Dish said. In 2000, NDS, Tarnovsky and Menard “effectuated” a “wide-spread compromise” of Dish’s conditional access system, Dish said. Tarnovsky posted the codes needed to crack the system until January 2001, while other hackers distributed them at various Web sites for another two years, Dish said.
There is “no validity to the allegations” in Dish’s suit and a “significant proportion of the claims have already been dismissed over the years,” NDS said in a statement. The suit and “associated discovery” have strengthened NDS’ position that it had “nothing to do with” the piracy of the Dish system, NDS said. “The hacking of Dish was the result of inferior technology arising from inadequate investment in research and development by Kudelski,” NDS said. NDS invests 30 percent of its annual revenue in R&D and as a result has “zero piracy” and its customers’ platforms are “completely secure,” NDS said. Tarnovsky recently told an audience at a Black Hat hackers conference in Amsterdam that he was paid by NDS to break the code on Kudelski cards, but maintained that “this is an activity that all of the companies in the trade do. But why would I have published those codes on the net for free? I am not stupid, and I never had the intention of taking that risk.”