Hacking Incident goes on Czech TV

18/06/2007 Written by Boris Mutina (minor)

Watch­ing TV on Sun­day morn­ing , while still in bed, could be very relax­ing. For exam­ple, if you are in Czech Repub­lic you can watch a TV trans­mis­sion on idyl­lic land­scapes accom­pa­nied by soft, clas­si­cal music: a sort of mind-​yoga. But what could you think about if, instead of lawns, fields or moun­tains, you see on the screen the typ­i­cal mush­room shape pro­duced by a nuke explosion?Such view could be seen last Sun­day morn­ing, dur­ing live Panorama show on Czech TV, Chan­nel CT2 (watch it here ).
Nuclear war? No, just a hack­ing attack: as it was said later in Czech TV-​journals, those pic­tures were fake, and the trans­mis­sion had been hacked.

The whole action was pre­pared by the art group Zto­hoven, whose web­site went soon offline because of the mas­sive num­ber of visitors.

Domain zto​hoven​.com was reg­is­tered only few days before the attack, but the man who made the reg­is­tra­tion denied any con­nec­tion between him and art group.

The Group is well known in Czech Repub­lic because of other actions. In this spe­cific occa­sion they also released a state­ment on Myspace where they wrote:

“We are not ter­ror­ist nor polit­i­cal group and our goal is not some­how to frighten the soci­ety, or toma­nip­u­late it, as we see it every­day in real world and in media. Be it polit­i­cal inten­tions, or mar­ket­ing inten­tions, com­pa­nies, supra­na­tional com­pa­nies, use to manip­u­late peo­ple with­out they could even real­ize it, by push­ing pre-​packed prod­ucts and ideas with all pos­si­ble means into cit­i­zens’ minds. We think that a slight vio­la­tion of this sys­tem, could work as a way to shaken men, whose men­tal inde­pen­dence should never be affected in demo­c­ra­tic lands.

There­fore art group Zto­hoven some years ago vio­lated a pub­lic area in Czech cap­i­tal Prague, we impeached com­mer­cial space in fun­da­ments and com­mer­cial space itself.

On 17.06.2007 the group attacked media space, a tele­vi­sion space. The Group vio­lated it, impeached its reli­a­bil­ity. The group warned about a pos­si­ble sub­sti­tu­tion of “Media world” with the world as it is, the real one. Is all that we see on TV true, is it real­ity? Is all that Media tell us true ? This is the idea, that our project brings, remind it. We believe that free space in pub­lic, legal TV should carry this mes­sage, and we hope that our action could work as an invi­ta­tion to media to show the truth.
Thanks for free media, free space for society.”

The spokesman of the group, Zdenek Dostal, declared they knew about legal con­se­quences of their action and that they were aware of it. He also apol­o­gizes to every­one, who was scared to death.


Czech TV already announced, that Czech Police has started inves­ti­gat­ing on the tech­niques they used to carry out the attack.
Attack­ers breached into trans­mis­sion that is made by a third party for Czech TV. Details on how the attack was per­pe­trated were not pub­lished, but it appears, that cams are not secured.

Funny? I don’t think so. Such activ­ity shows the human’s vul­ner­a­bil­ity: we believe in what we see. And it also showed, that an hijacked TV can trans­mit any­thing, all an attacker wants to show. Just imag­ine what could have hap­pened if these pic­tures were broad­casted in Mid­dle East. Or you can’t imag­ine this at all?