Media Player Encryption was hacked

Norwegian hacker, DVD Jon, has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm used in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player to protect media content from hackers, opening up content broadcasting for multiple platforms and device.

The encryption algorithm is used to wrap Media Player NSC files in order to protect source IP address and stream format from hackers. When the file is opened in Media Player, the information is being decoded and then connected to the stream server specified.

His latest hack was done as part of the open source project VideoLAN streaming media player. Jon wanted to make Media Player content available for the client which is distributed among 12 different operating systems and Linux distributions.

According to Jon, there is no good reason to encrypt the information inside the file since once the file is being decoded, a simple tool such as netstat can reveal the IP address and port number of the streaming server.

The hacker hopes his latest work will help distribute Media Player content to a range vast of non-Windows platforms.