Comment by HeyLaughingBoy
4 days ago
It's even older than Stuxnet, but either Dish Network (Echostar) or DirectTV did something similar in the early 2000's/late 90's.
They were having a lot of trouble with pirate receivers, so they added small chunks of code to normal device updates and this went on over a period of weeks/months. On the final update, it stitched all those bits of code together and every receiver that wasn't a legitimate one displayed the message "GAME OVER" on the screen and stopped working.
Obvs it was a long time ago so forgive me if I get some details wrong.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/01/25/directv_attacks_hacke... The code apparently permanently wrote an infinite loop into hacked smart cards' firmware, bricking them.
Thanks for finding that. I looked around but couldn't figure out any useful search terms.