the Max Headroom incident
lorehackingops culture
The 1987 Chicago broadcast hijacking by someone in a Max Headroom mask, still unsolved.
On the night of November 22, 1987, an intruder overpowered the studio-to-transmitter links of two Chicago stations, first WGN's sportscast for seconds, then WTTW during Doctor Who for about ninety bizarre seconds of masked ranting. Overriding a broadcast link required real RF engineering and more transmit power than the legitimate uplink, and despite an FCC investigation nobody was ever identified. It remains broadcast signal intrusion's defining case and one of hacker culture's favorite mysteries.