Pedestrian Crossings in Northern California Hacked to Play Fake Messages

Pedestrian crossings in multiple counties across northern California were recently attacked by ransomware. This strange no-fun-allowed scenario included phony tweets projected in the voices of tech titans Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, taking over the audio tour functions. The crashes had been happening just south of San Francisco—in Menlo Park and Palo Alto.

The city officials discovered the hacking during the weekend. Proponents say at least 10 otherwise marked pedestrian crossings in Menlo Park were impacted. The municipality of Palo Alto announced that 12 crossings along its downtown corridor had been defaced. The audio features broke, no longer telling people when to “walk” or “wait.” This concern led to an intervention by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans).

The unusual messages included one in Musk’s voice welcoming people to Palo Alto and another from Zuckerberg stating, “real ones call me The Zuck.” These messages focused on the security of our public infrastructure and that danger when technology fails.

Officials acted swiftly to mitigate the disruption. Meghan Horrigan-Taylor, a representative from the Palo Alto city staff, stated, “City staff have disabled the audible feature until further repairs can be made.” This step was necessary in order to stop the wider broadcast of the compromised messages as the investigation into their source proceeds.

Yet those hacking incidents made waves with their comedic gold. They further expose hidden vulnerabilities in our public systems. Caltrans is working around the clock to determine the extent of these breaches. They are equally committed to learning how these incidents occurred and putting additional safety measures in place to ensure that they never happen again.

Meanwhile, authorities are still trying to gauge the full extent of the hacking’s impact. This incident speaks to the urgent, national need for cybersecurity to be embedded into our public infrastructure. And as technology continues to play an even larger role in our everyday lives, the importance of strong security measures is ever more urgent.