On September 16, 2018, the Jaguars were playing the New England Patriots when the in-stadium screen experienced, in the US government's words,

How to hack the Jacksonville Jaguars’ jumbotron (and end up in jail for 220 years)

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2024-04-03 21:30:09

On September 16, 2018, the Jaguars were playing the New England Patriots when the in-stadium screen experienced, in the US government's words, "a loss in reference sync which manifested as a large horizontal green lines [sic] appearing across one whole video board."

On November 18, during a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers, it happened again—but this time, entire video sub-boards filled with green.

Then, on December 2, 2018, the Indianapolis Colts came to town and the jumbotron glitched a third time as "a single video board experienced a change of what seemed to be the zoom of one of the base graphics displayed."

The Jaguars' IT staff could not at the time replicate any of these video errors, and they began to suspect that what they were seeing was not a technical problem but some sort of attack. Digging into log files, they quickly found that the source of the December 2 problem was "a command to change a specific parameter" of the video control software.

Where had the command come from? An Abekas Mira video control server known as MIRA9120. The Abekas Mira was meant to help in the production and display of instant replay video to be shown in-stadium on the massive jumbotron, but this particular server had been either decommissioned or kept on hand as a spare. In any event, the team thought the server was in storage. But when they went looking, MIRA9120 turned out to be sitting in the main server room, installed on a rack just beside the active Abekas Mira servers.