Drivers Stunned To See Racial Slur On Digital Sign In North Carolina

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to News@lemmy.world – 124 points – Drivers Stunned To See Racial Slur On Digital Sign In North Carolina
jalopnik.com

NCDOT says the sign was hacked, but the roadside display wasn't even locked.

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"Hacked" does not mean "left the back door open so the computer could be stolen."

TBH, leaving it unlocked is a great way to hedge your bets if you're an NCDOT employee who wants to put N***** on a sign

It's just shorthand for "unauthorized access to a digital system". There could be no password at all and it would still count as "hacking". The difficulty of gaining access isn't really relevant, legally speaking.

I hope they at least had a unauthorized use warning aka Login Banner.

https://security.tennessee.edu/login-banners/

This need for a warning login banner is sometimes called a myth in INFO SEC. But if it is a myth it's a VERY old one.

1990 NIST - Defense Data Network Security Bulletin:

b. A court recently threw out a suit against a computer system intruder because the logon prompt was preceded with "Welcome to...".

https://ftp.st.ryukoku.ac.jp/pub/security/ciac/secdocs/ddn/ddn-9004.txt ftp://ciac.llnl.gov/pub/ciac/secdocs/ddn/ddn-9004.txt

Yeah and if I recall correctly the default password on these things is like 1234 and rarely changed. So unlocked with a stupid password isn't even close to hacked.

unlocked with a stupid password isn’t even close to hacked

It's hacking in the same sense that stealing stuff from a house after the owner left the door unlocked is burglary, with that sense being the legal sense.

From a 2009 Jalopnik article:

Should it will ask you for a password. Try "DOTS", the default password.

In all likelihood, the crew will not have changed it. However if they did, never fear. Hold "Control" and "Shift" and while holding, enter "DIPY". This will reset the sign and reset the password to "DOTS" in the process. You're in!

You can also find the manuals for these electronic road signs easily online.

Most instances of hacking rely on social engineering because the human element is typically the weakest point of any system. Real life isn't a movie, hacking is a hell of a lot more mundane and the ways hackers achieve their goals are often as silly as this case where someone literally left a door open. So yes, this sign was "hacked." And yes, it was the result of a very stupid mistake on the part of an employee of the NCDOT. The term isn't dependent on the difficulty or complexity of the task. It just refers to finding a vulnerability and exploiting it.

No shit. Fucking Stuxnet was achieved by dropping a thumbdrive outside the building and letting a naive, curious iranian scientist plug it into their airlocked computer network.

Then it played looped video while it destroyed everything. Just like a shitty Mission Impossible movie. In real life. Dead serious.

This is North Carolina; How "stunned" were they, really?

Raleigh (and all the cities in North Carolina, really) is quite liberal. This area included. RTP, in particular, is very highly educated.

You don't get the deplorables until you get to rural areas, which is what happens in, like, every place but Vermont.

This was probably just high school kids trying to be edgy.

It screams undeveloped cortex.

No, there's a concerted effort of these morons coming into RTP and doing this shit. If I see one more goddamn maga sticker on a road sign, I'm going to break out the spray paint and start fixing it myself.

I can speak from personal experince, but more often than not the keyboard for these isn't locked. About a decade ago, I changed one of them to "Fry - Nixon 2016" as a dumb little Futurama reference. It stayed that way for about a week.

As horrible as this is, not gonna lie it's a little funny, just wish they didn't use a slur for the joke.

What a wasted opportunity too. They could have written something truly fun and disruptive, like "UFO CRASH SITE AHEAD - PLEASE YIELD TO BLACK VANS"