This reminds me of the story between a cable-box developer and crackers. I'll need to find the exact story, but it goes something like this: The developer would

This reminds me of the story between a cable-box developer and crackers. I'll need to find the exact story, but it goes something like this: The developer would send an over-the-air update, the crackers would crack it within days and provide that to their userbase. Usually the crackers would just nop out the few instructions that branched into DRM code or something. At some point, the crackers noticed that the OTAs seemed to include "dead" code, that wasn't being called by anything. Just in case it was used by the live code, they left it in. It didn't prevent their cracks. Then, a little bit down the line, an OTA update made use of all those pieces of dead code to simultaneously harden legitimate boxes against cracking, and brick hacked boxes. The developer had, in effect, distributed his countermeasures piecemeal in order to pass the crackers guards and be included in the cracked network, and in one delayed action assembled and activated the countermeasure. Edit: Ah, here was the story from 2001 about the "Black Sunday Kill", and it was DirectTV: https://slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-war-on-hackers https://slashdot.org/story/01/01/25/1343218/directvs-secret-... And it looks like this was the guy who did it: http://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all http://www.wired.com/2008/05/tarnovsky/?currentPage=all I got a bunch of the details wrong (hey, it's been 15 years!) but that's the gist of it. The Slashdot story has the meat of it!