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A Hacker Put Marco Rubio Porn Memes on Two Billboards in Alabama

The infamous hacker Andrew Auernheimer found a bunch of easy-to-hack billboards.
A screenshot of one of the two hacked billboards. (Image: Twitter/Cockring_Johnny)

A Twitter user nicknamed Johnny Cockring put up a porn meme of Marco Rubio on two billboards in Alabama on Friday.

The stunt came a day after the infamous hacker Andrew Auernheimer, better known as Weev, revealed that a few gigantic LED billboards connected to the internet were trivial to hack using default credentials.

"Here's a bunch of those gigantic LED screen billboards on Shodan," he tweeted on Thursday. "Default credentials are admin/admin."

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Less than 24 hours later, Johnny Cockring took advantage of the flaw.

"Weev was the one who posted the security flaw," Cockring told me. "I just did the next logical step to proof of concept."

"[I] didn't change anything," he said in a Twitter message. "Just added that [image] to the playlist. Usually there are about 20 or so pic and [they] rotate every few seconds and eventually the Rubio pic gets played in the rotation."

"It was fun while it lasted."

Cockring, who declined to reveal his real name, added that he won't hack more billboards.

"I'm not going to do anymore. It was fun while it lasted," he said.

Auernheimer said he had no intention to hack the billboards himself, and said that he actually reached out to the company providing the billboards to alert them of the issue. Auernheimer denied being facetious.

"I would never be unserious about the ethical importance of responsible public exploit disclosure," he told me in an online chat. Then, perhaps being sarcastic, he added: "I fully disavow his actions! We can't have people running around lawlessly bringing laughter to the world like this."

Motherboard was able to independently verify that somebody had accessed the control system of at least one billboard.

This is not the first time that hackers have broken into insecure billboards for a prank. Last year, someone replaced an ad in Atlanta billboard with a giant image of a man bent over unnaturally stretching his rectum, an ancient meme known as "Goatse."