A team of hackers from Brazil have taken first place in a hackathon organized by the country’s telecoms regulator. The challenge was to develop a solution to prevent non-approved ‘pirate’ set-top devices from functioning in people’s homes. The team say they were able to remotely transfer code which completely disabled a target device. Once implemented, “there will be a general failure in most of the irregular boxes in use,” the hacker predicted.
Bug bounties and hackathons are notorious for being the coding equivalent of working for exposure. These are inherently cost savings programs so that companies don’t feel like they need to purchase these assets at market price.