Expand/ Three examples of the video screen tampering.
United States DOJ
Was somebody tinkering the Jacksonville Jaguars’ huge jumbotron?
On September 16, 2018, the Jaguars were playing the New England Patriots when the in-stadium screen experienced, in the United States federal government’s words, “a loss in referral sync which manifested as a big horizontal green lines [sic] appearing throughout one entire video board.”
On November 18, throughout a video game versus the Pittsburgh Steelers, it occurred once again– however this time, whole video sub-boards filled with green.
On December 2, 2018, the Indianapolis Colts came to town and the jumbotron glitched a 3rd time as “a single video board experienced a modification of what appeared to be the zoom of one of the base graphics showed.”
The Jaguars’ IT personnel might not at the time duplicate any of these video mistakes, and they started to presume that what they were seeing was not a technical issue however some sort of attack. Going into log files, they rapidly discovered that the source of the December 2 issue was “a command to alter a particular specification” of the video control software application.
Where had the command originated from? An Abekas Mira video control server called MIRA9120. The Abekas Mira was suggested to assist in the production and display screen of instantaneous replay video to be revealed in-stadium on the huge jumbotron, however this specific server had actually been either decommissioned or kept on hand as an extra. In any occasion, the group believed the server remained in storage. When they went looking, MIRA9120 turned out to be sitting in the primary server space, set up on a rack simply next to the active Abekas Mira servers.
IT staffers began poking around in MIRA9120 and discovered the remote-access software application TeamViewer, recommending that somebody had actually been managing MIRA9120 from elsewhere. Just restricted information about the offender might be obtained, since the TeamViewer circumstances had connection logging handicapped.
On December 3, the Jaguars’ IT personnel detached MIRA9120 from the other video control servers– however they left it powered on and in location. They turned TeamViewer’s connection logging back on. The concept was to establish a honeypot in case the assailant returned.
Throughout the December 16 video game versus Washington, TeamViewer tape-recorded another connection into MIRA9120. The TeamViewer account number that accessed the device was logged, and the info was passed to the FBI, which was now actively examining the circumstance. Representatives sent out a subpoena to TeamViewer, which in February 2019 supplied the IP address of the maker that had actually utilized the account in concern on that day.
This IP address was managed by Comcast, so a subpoena to Comcast lastly showed up the info the Jaguars desired: MIRA9120 was accessed on December 16 from a home in St. Augustine, Florida– a home where Samuel Arthur Thompson was living.
The secret
The Jags understood Thompson. He had actually invested almost 5 years as a professional for the football group,