Zombies Ahead!

Here in Austin, Texas, the moto is "Keep Austin Weird". We pride ourselves on standing out :-)
But one person in particular stood out so much that his/her words were put in lights. On January 19th a portable traffic sign at Lamar Boulevard and West 15th Street, near the University of Texas at Austin, was hacked into. This hacker happily announced to the driving public that there were "Zombies Ahead".

On his drive in to work Chris Lippincott, director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation, got his first look at the warning sign. His reply? "It was clever, kind of cute, but not what it was intended for." I like to think he got a pretty good chuckle as well.

According to the blog i-hacked.com (post: Inside Programmable Road Signs on Tuesday, 20 January 2009), some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO's ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed. AND they supply a play by play as to exactly how these signs can be hacked and how to reset the default password. Oops! Watch out zombies! Something worse might be coming!

ADDCO Chief Operating Officer Brian Nicholson told FOXNews.com that the company intends to send out notices to their customers regarding the potentially dangerous security flaw. As of yet, Austin officials do not know the identity of the hacker but I firmly believe that the hacker is none other than the person who placed the post on i-hacked. Add one and one... you will generally get two.

As an Austinite, I simply find it funny. Sure, hackers could pull some potentially catastrophic trick with these things but, in the interest of "Keeping Austin Weird", alerting drivers of the danger of Zombies Ahead is a small drop in the bucket.

For more information about this story, you can visit FOXNews.com and the link for i-Hacked.

Gwynn~