Superbowl Porn attack, what when they monetize?
While most of the United States was watching the Pittsburgh Steelers win the superbowl with a last minute touchdown, Comcast viewers in Arizona had their football interrupted by a pornographic video.
While the cause of the disruption is not yet known, it stretches credibility to believe that this was operator error. Most likely it will turn out to be an act of vandalism by a disgruntled employee or an external attacker. In either case, we need to know quickly as casual attacks by vandals tend to be followed by professional attacks for profit.
At a minimum the attacker has demonstrated the ability to map one cable channel onto another. But imagine that the attacker had the ability to inject arbitrary content into the New York city cable feed for Bloomberg or CNBC. It really isn't very difficult to see how a profitable stock manipulation fraud can be set up.
The big problem with electronic media is establishing authenticity. As we come to rely on electronic information sources, the risk of being fed spurious data increases. Unless we take the problem seriously soon, others will force us to take it seriously.
