UBI World TV - Mass Piracy of The Service

Mass Piracy of The Service

In late 2008, UBI introduced the new Irdeto Epsilon card part of its encryption process. This new card was considered secure at the time, and most importantly could not be used in sharing servers due to its "Surf Lock" countermeasure. By mid-2009, pirates found a way to by pass this countermeasure and began offering some of the UBI channels on their pirate sharing servers for a cheap yearly fee. Because those sharing servers required the customer to have an internet connection and a satellite dish simultaneously, the pirate service was later reduced to a few channels as there was little interest due to the nature of the UBI audience being mostly elderly and had no internet at home.

In December 2010, a team of worldwide hackers introduced the Dragon Card. The card was available in three flavours, Yellow (for ME and AFRICA), Blue (Europe) and the RED (Australia). The Red Dragon Card or RDC was used to pirate Austar, Mysat, TVB, UBI and all the GLOBECAST clients. However as there was a shortage for the Dragon Cards in Australia, hackers in Australia decided to hack the RDC. They converted it to software that runs in the famous Dreambox Satellite Receiver (dm500). The result was, the EMUBOX 500 aka the OFFLINE BOX. This very cheap box (circa $40), was now equipped with the RDC codes, and can decode most Australian services with no Internet Connection nor a SmartCard. Just PLUG and WATCH.

EMUBOX 500 hit the piracy market in late 2011, and was sold in satellite shops for around 75 AUD. By mid 2012, there was an estimated 50,000 boxes already sold mainly in Sydney and Melbourne leaving satellite shops with no stock.

At this stage, sales have dropped for the operators and for the pirate servers. One pirate server operator, asked a hacker to extract the codes used in emubox and sucssesfully sent the codes to irdeto, resulting in the death of all codes. Strangely, UBI codes remained active until the collapse of the company. One hacker explained that irdeto, in order to kill a code, they need to roll the keys aka Group Keys. This normally occurs every fortnight, and it is not a free service.