Hacked road sign calls Donald Trump a “shape shifting lizard”

ByCraig Haley

Motorists in Texas may have been surprised to see a number of electronic road signs in the Lone Star State displaying some pretty unorthodox public messages this week.

According to one at least, presidential hopeful Donald Trump is a “shape shifting lizard”.

Another stated “Bernie for President”. Another implored motorists to go home since work had been cancelled.

See the tweet below from an NBC reporter who spotted the messages.

The Texas Department of Transportation was quickly alerted, but not before many thousands of motorists passed the hacked road signs. The signs – which had been contracted from a third party company – were soon turned off once workers had been told of the cyber intrusion.

So how did it happen? It seems the good old Internet of Things may not have been to blame for this incident. A spokesperson for the Texas DOT claimed the signs could not have been accessed remotely, meaning the intruders would have to physically have been there at the signs and bypassed the security measures to change the message.


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And what security measures were those? It appears it was a password, but it looks like it wasn’t particularly effective. We doubt anyone would want to spend hours at the side of the road trying to hack a road sign as a joke. We imagine the intruders managed to compromise the signs pretty quickly, so the password was probably either left to the default, or was a commonly used password.

That, or the intruders managed to obtain the password through other means. We don’t know at this point.

The people responsible remain at large.