Interests
Floricic was highly interested in electronics and security systems of all kinds. He engaged in, amongst other things, attacks against the German phonecard and Pay TV systems. As part of his research he exchanged ideas and proposals with other hackers and scientists. On the mailing list "tv-crypt", operated by a closed group of Pay TV hackers, Floricic reported about himself in 1995 that his interests were microprocessors, programming languages, electronics of all kinds, digital radio data transmission and especially breaking the security of systems perceived as secure. He claimed to have created working clones of a chipcard used for British Pay TV and would continue his work to defeat the security of the Nagravision/Syster scrambling system which was then used by the German Pay TV provider "PREMIERE".
Later, American scientists outlined a theoretical attack against SIM cards used for GSM mobile phones. Together with hackers from the Chaos Computer Club, Floricic successfully created a working clone of such a SIM card, thus showing the practicability of the attack. He also engaged in cloning the German phonecard and succeeded. While Floricic only wanted to demonstrate the insecurity of the system, the proven insecurity was also abused by criminals which led to the attention of law enforcement agencies and the German national phone operator Deutsche Telekom. After Deutsche Telekom changed the system, Floricic tried to remove a complete public card phone from a booth by force (using a sledgehammer) on 3 March 1995 in order to, as he told, adapt his phonecard simulators to the latest changes. He and a friend were, however, caught by the police upon this attempt. Floricic was later sentenced to a prison term of 15 months which was suspended on probation.
Read more about this topic: Cryptophon
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