I really want to know the full story behind this epic hack, and yet I also hope it is never solved.
It's my favorite day! It's the 38th anniversary of the Max Headroom signal broadcast intrusion!
1st incident lasted 25s during the 9PM news on WGN-TV in Chicago; The 2nd, 2hrs later, lasted ~90s on PBS affiliate WTTW during Dr. Who.
You can watch it here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqge...
Max Headroom 1987 Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident
YouTube video by andrew867
Why is this my favorite hack of all time?
- It was harmless, but exploited and demonstrated a serious vulnerability
- The combination of technical sophistication and utterly juvenile content
- No one ever took credit or explained it. It was pure art
Nov 22, 2025 21:57Less than a year later, we got the Morris worm, which, but for a few unfortunate bugs, could have been similar.
The Max Headroom hack wasn't done by overwhelming the broadcast signal (which would require an extremely powerful transmitter), but rather by overwhelming the "studio transmitter link" that feeds programming to the transmitter. This is conceptually straightforward, but required meticulous planning.
So whoever did it had an impressive amount of broadcasting knowledge and skill, had access to relatively esoteric gear, and did a deep research on the specific STL setups used by the two stations. And used all this capability to pointlessly goof around for a few minutes.
Beautiful.
If you can't see the beauty in this, we will never be able to be true friends.
One interesting question is whether there are any US TV broadcasters still using analog STLs (that would be vulbnable to the Max Headroom attack). I suspect that the switch to digital ATSC in the early 2000's pretty wll killed them off when broadcasters had to replace their transmitters.
That said, I'll bet there are a fair number of AM and FM radio stations out there still using easily hijacked analog STLs. Probably none in the major markets, but there are a lot of small stations operating on shoestring budgets using old equipment.
For context: STL means "Studio-Transmitter Link", a UHF or microwave link between the broadcast studio (usually located downtown) and the (usually unstaffed) transmitter site (with a big tower somewhere, maybe on a hill). Pogramming is fed to the transmitter over the STL.
