A busy Brazilian bus station was hijacked by hard-core porn enthusiasts over the weekend. Every screen in the joint showed explicit sexual imagery for about 15 minutes during Friday rush hour.
Oh myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy, as George Takei would say.
The arrival and departure screens were completely taken over at the Boqueirao station, in Curitiba, Brazil, leaving local police scrambling to answer shocked viajeros.
“Frankly, it's amazing to see that. I have no words,” one told media.
Exposure was fairly widespread: Curitaba, a city of about 2 million, is a major state capital and one of the largest cities in southern Brazil.
A source at the urban transport authority told Atlantico that "the station security system will ... be strengthened.”
"A complaint was made to the police specialized in computer crimes and trying to identify the IP address of the intruder," the source added.
Meanwhile, down at Curitaba city hall, the third-party contractor responsible for running the screens has been told in no uncertain terms that systems need to be hardened...so to speak.
The situation points out once again that pixel boards can be filled full of security holes. A similar incident in Serbia involved something rather more wholesome than X-rated videos: Space Invaders.
Ivan Petrovic, 21, and Filip Stanisavljevic, 20, broke into a billboard in Belgrade, and proceeded to blast away at aliens for 22 minutes, much to the delight of passersby.
“We wanted to demonstrate how companies sometimes pay very little attention to security – it had nothing to do with this specific company or even billboard companies, but rather any company that uses any form of technology that can be targeted by this kind of attack,” the two said. “We chose the billboard simply because we believed it is the strongest way to prove our point.”
Nostalgia for the days of old-school arcade games aside, the owners of the digital sign were actually pleased because, they said, it alerted them to a security hole with no real harm done. In fact, billboard ad company, DPC, gave the pair iPad minis to reward their efforts.
“This has never happened before, but we appreciate the fact that these guys have, in a charming way, pointed us to this huge problem,” Slobodan Petrovic, manager at DPC, told Serbian newspaper Kurir, as reported by ABC News. “Now it is clearer than ever that we need to protect ourselves better. In more developed countries, these actions are unthinkable because of severe sanctions.”