History and stories
The Max Headroom TV hijacking was never solved
During a Sunday night newscast in Chicago, the screen went black. Then a figure in a rubber mask appeared, swaying in front of a metal backdrop.
1 min readStory
The short version
On one night in 1987, someone in a Max Headroom mask took over two Chicago TV stations. Nobody has ever been identified.
The story
At 9:14 p.m. on November 22, 1987, viewers of WGN-TV’s nine o’clock news in Chicago saw the sports segment cut out. In its place was a person in a Max Headroom mask, swaying in front of a rotating metal panel. There was no sound, only a buzz. Engineers regained control after about 17 seconds.
About two hours later it happened again, on WTTW, the local public station, during an episode of Doctor Who. This time the transmitter site had nobody on duty. The intruders had sound, and they stayed on the air for about 90 seconds of rambling, mumbled jokes before the broadcast returned to normal.
The Federal Communications Commission investigated, but the people responsible were never found.
Why it mattered
The intruders never set foot in the studios. They sent a stronger microwave signal to the stations’ broadcast towers than the stations were sending themselves, and the equipment simply passed along whichever signal was strongest. No one ever claimed responsibility, and the case is still widely referenced decades later.
The lesson today
The second hijacking lasted far longer than the first for one reason: nobody was watching the second transmitter. The same is true of business systems. An attack on a system with monitoring gets noticed and stopped quickly. An attack on a system nobody watches can run much longer.
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