The process was complex, time-consuming, and very expensive. This was not about a lone hacker sitting at a computer screen trying to guess passwords. Instead, it was an attempt to split the foundation stone supporting an entire industry - the technology protecting pay TV - Card Embosser . The challenge handed in the autumn of 1997 to a team of scientists working quietly at a laboratory in Haifa, northern Israel, was to crack the encryption technique used to unscramble TV signals delivered to many paying customers through cable and satellite across Europe and the US. The so-called "smart" or "conditional access" cards used to access Sky, ITV Digital, and other premium channels contain wafer-thin computer chips holding complex codes to make sure viewers see only what they have paid to see. The Haifa team knew all about this. They worked for NDS, a Murdoch company which had begun life as a start-up firm, News Datacom, in Israel eight years earlier. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation had backed the venture in the belief that the coming digital age required a quantum leap in areas such as data security and the encryption of communications Card Embossing Machine . NDS was to go on and design the encryption process that would be used on the Contact Smart Card handed out with every Murdoch pay TV package in the world. With 27m viewers using its cards in 40% of the world's satellite receivers, it would become a company valued at well over $1bn in its own right. But NDS had one important rival, an encryption technology developed in France by the local broadcaster Canal Plus which had been adopted by just about all News Corporation's rival broadcasters. The NDS team in Haifi, according to a lawsuit filed in the US district court for the Nothern District of California, set out to "sabotage Canal Plus technological security measures engineered into its Contact Smart Cards." Breaking the encryption alone would cost up to $5m. The process demanded the use of ultra-expensive electron-scanning microscopes, with the team probing wafer- thin chips no bigger than a thumbnail. Each chip contained up to 50 layers, with each layer in turn carrying up to 1,000 transistors, every one of which had to be pulled apart and analysed Card Embosser, Card Embossing Machine, Contact Smart Card