The Dumbest Hack of the Year Exposed a Very Real Problem

In the wee hours of the night last April, someone stopped at roughly 20 street intersections across Silicon Valley and launched an unprecedented cyberattack that would eventually spread to multiple states, embarrassing local officials and prompting them to question their security practices. Authorities suspect the unknown culprit took advantage of weak and publicly available default passwords to wirelessly upload custom recordings that played whenever a pedestrian pressed a crosswalk button.

Instead of the normal recordings telling people to either wait or cross the street, pedestrians heard the spoofed voices of billionaire tech CEOs. A fake Mark Zuckerberg said at one Menlo Park intersection that people would not be able to stop AI from “forcefully” being inserted “into every facet of your conscious experience.” At another, he celebrated “undermining democracy.” At a different intersection, an altered Elon Musk described President Donald Trump as “actually really sweet and tender and loving,” while on a nearby street his faked voice whined about being “so alone.”

It's almost like... maybe we should give our civic employees enough budget and time to implement the bare minimum basic things you need to do when deploying infrastructure like this?

But yes, continue the layoffs and cutting taxes, everybody.