Brooklynboys
04-07-2008, 12:00 PM
Had a friend send me this posting. Found it to be interesting and thought I would pass it along to members of simplefta community.
From DN 2007 Annual Report:
Quote:
Satellite programming signals have been subject to theft, and we are vulnerable to subscriber fraud, which could cause us to lose subscribers and revenue.
Increases in theft of our signal, or our competitors’ signals, could also limit subscriber growth and cause subscriber churn to increase. We use microchips embedded in credit card-sized access cards, called “smart cards,” or security chips in our receiver systems to control access to authorized programming content. However, our signal encryption has been compromised by theft of service, and even though we continue to respond to compromises of our encryption system with security measures intended to make signal theft of our programming more difficult, theft of our signal is increasing. We cannot assure you that we will be successful in reducing or controlling theft of our service. During 2005, we replaced our smart cards in order to reduce theft of our service. However, the smart card replacement did not fully secure our
system, and we have since implemented software patches and other security measures to help protect our service. Nevertheless, these security measures are short-term fixes and we remain susceptible to additional signal theft. Therefore, we have developed a plan to replace our existing smart cards and/or security chips to re-secure our signals for a longer term which will commence later this year and is expected to take approximately nine to twelve months to complete. While our existing smart cards installed in 2005 remain under warranty, we could incur operational costs in excess of $50 million in connection with our smart card replacement program.
:flame:
From DN 2007 Annual Report:
Quote:
Satellite programming signals have been subject to theft, and we are vulnerable to subscriber fraud, which could cause us to lose subscribers and revenue.
Increases in theft of our signal, or our competitors’ signals, could also limit subscriber growth and cause subscriber churn to increase. We use microchips embedded in credit card-sized access cards, called “smart cards,” or security chips in our receiver systems to control access to authorized programming content. However, our signal encryption has been compromised by theft of service, and even though we continue to respond to compromises of our encryption system with security measures intended to make signal theft of our programming more difficult, theft of our signal is increasing. We cannot assure you that we will be successful in reducing or controlling theft of our service. During 2005, we replaced our smart cards in order to reduce theft of our service. However, the smart card replacement did not fully secure our
system, and we have since implemented software patches and other security measures to help protect our service. Nevertheless, these security measures are short-term fixes and we remain susceptible to additional signal theft. Therefore, we have developed a plan to replace our existing smart cards and/or security chips to re-secure our signals for a longer term which will commence later this year and is expected to take approximately nine to twelve months to complete. While our existing smart cards installed in 2005 remain under warranty, we could incur operational costs in excess of $50 million in connection with our smart card replacement program.
:flame: