About eight years ago a media story broke about how some “hackers” took over a British Ministry of Defense Satellite and were holding it for ransom. Anyone who knew anything about Command and Control systems for satellites knew this would be almost impossible especially for a military satellite. That didn’t stop Newsbytes, Yahoo News, ZDNet, even Reuters from running the story and sensationalizing the crap out of it. None of the ‘legitimate’ media questioned the story at all. They just reran the original Sunday Business story. The only website that I know of that questioned the story at the time was The Hacker News Network.. It was the questioning of that story that prompted Brock Meeks of MSNBC to label HNN as “the voice of reason”. As it turned out no confirmation of the original story was ever obtained, the Ministry of Defense flat out denied the event ever took place and the Sunday Business never revealed where the story came from.
So? Big deal? What’s the point of this walk down memory lane? Well, here it is eight years later and the same crappy media is republishing the same bullshit story as truth and fact. Evidently Corinne Iozzio over at PC Magazine, nor her (his?) editors can be bothered to do basic journalism, simple research or check facts. No, can’t let facts get in the way of a good headline and increased page views and ad impressions. So now this supposed ‘hack’ that as far as I can tell never actually happened, is the second most mysterious unsolved cyber crime. I suppose, on the Internet, if you repeat something enough times it magically turns into fact?
For reference here are the old HNN pages from March 1, 1999 and March 2, 1999. Unfortunately the chrome is gone and none of the links work anymore but the content is unchanged.
UPDATE: Thanks to Google’s 10th Anniversary Archive from 2001 and the Internet Archive a few quick searches help to confirm that the original story was fake. (Hey, Corinne, this took me all of about ten minutes.)
ZDNet – via Internet Archive “Our Satellites are Hack Proof”
Geek.com – via Internet Archive “Satellite hack is impossible, says UK”
Reuters Retraction – via Shmoo.com “British Defense Ministry Dismisses Hacker Report”