Broadcasting Masks and Mayhem
Welcome to spooky season, we are so glad you could join us for our October series on unsolved cybercrimes! While it might be comforting to think we know the origin of every instance of malicious activity, it’s simply impossible. For the next month we will be going through some of the biggest unsolved cybercrimes, how they came to be, and why they still sit unsolved. Starting off with one of the most memorable and widely shared instances of unsolved cybercrime, we have the Max Headroom hijacking of 87’.
Max Headroom?
For those who may not know, Max Headroom was a character played by Matt Frewer. The character was a ‘computer-generated' newscaster who participated in commentary on various topics of media interest. It was a satirical role made popular in part because of the ridiculous visual of Frewer in prosthetic makeup. He wore facial prosthetics, contacts, and a plastic looking wig along with a plastic chest piece that gave him the appearance of a doll. The sarcastic commentary and shocking image made him popular enough to sell Halloween masks. Not only was the image of Frewer in full prosthetics alarming, but the masks were also even creepier. The mask is only part of the reason the Max Headroom incident is so disturbing, the capacity of the hack was even more chilling.
The Hijack
On November 22nd, 1987, an unknown person or group of people hacked into the signals of two Chicago TV stations. The first intrusion features a man in a suit wearing a Max Headroom mask. Behind him was a sheet of metal that looked similar to the computer-like background of the Max Headroom show. The first station to be disrupted was WGN-TV. The hijacking happened during their sports segment. It only lasted about 17 second and featured the masked man swaying back and forth without audio. The only thing that can be heard is loud, distorted buzzing. The second station was PBS WTTW which was hijacked two hours later while broadcasting Doctor Who. The intrusion lasted 90 seconds and came with a disturbing message. It was an extremely muffled clip where the man seems to not say much of anything. The audio is even more distorted than the previous clip but the man can be heard calling sportscaster Chuck Swirksy and “frickin’ liberal” and saying the Coca Cola catchphrase “Catch the wave” while holding a can of Pepsi. This is a call back to an ad that Max Headroom used to do for Coke. The other parts of his message make little to no sense. He hums parts of the theme song to Clutch Cargo, an old, animated TV show and claims that he “made a giant masterpiece for the Greatest World Newspaper nerds” (WGN). All the while he is holding up a middle finger had exerting erratic physical motions. The last bit of the clip is the weirdest part of all. The man exposes his butt to the camera while an accomplice smacks him with a fly swatter.
The minute and a half that the man spent being broadcasted to all of Chicago ended with no clear message or motive expressed. The broadcast ended in static before the station went back to Dr. Who. The antic was a jumbled mess of phrases that had nothing to do with one another. While the hijacking didn’t contain any threatening messaging, it still disturbed enough people for the station to be flooded with calls asking what happened.
Status: Unsolved
The incident never came to any sort of resolution. There was no consensus on the message or what the intention behind it was. Most people assumed it was a couple of hackers who wanted to see if they would be able to hijack the channels just to be disruptive. It is still a complete mystery as to who was behind it. There have been speculations in the past, but they never led anywhere and even 37 years later, no one has come forward to fess up.
