Hackers "nuke" Czech beauty spot

 

Gallery

By Rene Millman

Posted on 20 Jun 2007 at 12:40

A Czech webcam was streaming lovely pastoral pictures of a local beauty spot, until hackers gained access and inserted pictures of the area being "nuked". Unfortunately, the video was also then broadcast live on television.

The incident occurred on Sunday morning on Czech TV programme Panorama. Hackers interrupted the regular webcam transmission with video "footage" of a nuclear explosion.

The stunt was pulled by a group of "artists" known as Ztohoven. Their website promptly went offline as massive numbers of users investigated the pranksters.

The group released a statement on their MySpace page to tell people they were not terrorists or a political group and their goal was not "somehow to frighten the society, or to manipulate it, as we see it everyday in real world and in media [sic]."

"We think that a slight violation of this system, could work as a way to shaken men, whose mental independence should never be affected in democratic lands," the statement read.

Security experts warned that this type of hacking demonstrates the security vulnerabilities involved when transmitting information across the internet.

"Internet-delivered broadcasts and internet TV transmissions are still in their infancy, but this doesn't stop hackers from attacking weak points in the transmission infrastructure," says Geoff Sweeney, chief technology officer of behavioural analysis software company Tier-3.

You can watch footage of the "explosion" here: