A group of Serbian hackers were rewarded with iPad Minis for exposing the vulnerability of an advertising billboard. The hackers managed to tap into the billboard and play Space Invaders from an iPhone.
The computer science students targeted a billboard in the center of Belgrade, Serbia last week in the Republic Square. Hacking the billboard with their iPhones, the group said that they wanted to show how little people care about computer security.
As TorrentFreak reports, "When we started with this hobby, we noticed that a large number of computer systems are very poorly protected or even have no protection at all from some very common attacks that hackers usually use," said one of the students.
"In a world where information is freely available, it is easy to learn just about anything, including "how to hack." We therefore feel that awareness needs to be raised about this general disregard for computer security," he told TorrentFreak.
The company that operated the billboard was informed about the security holes. The billboards owner, grateful that the students brought the major security issue to their attention rewarded each student with an iPad Mini.
"We suffered no damage, so we decided to gave them a mini iPad each," said Slobodan Bob Petrovic, the owner of DPC, which owns billboards in downtown Belgrade to ABC News. "This has never happened before, but we appreciate the fact that these guys have, in a charming way, pointed us to this huge problem," said Petrovic.
In support of The Pirate Bay, the students put up a logo for the peer-to-peer file sharing website with Ghandi's quote, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
"We strongly believe in the right of free speech and are against any form of censorship. The Pirate Bay is the closest we have to a free, apolitical independent worldwide organization that supports these values and we simply felt the need to support it in some way," said one of the students.
