Hackers Put Porn on Public Monitors, Billboards; Many Not Amused

In what could easily be the understatement of the week, if not the year, the manager of a Japanese-owned ASICS sportswear store on Shortland Street in Auckland, New Zealand told the New Zealand Herald, "Clearly this is an embarrassing situation." That "situation" was the showing of a hardcore movie on the store's outdoor video displays beginning at about 1 a.m. on Sunday night, September 29—that is, yesterday. The display was still visible—and attracting plenty of attention from passersby—when the store opened for business at 9:30 a.m., and it reportedly took another half-hour for the feed to the monitors to be cut. "I took a second look because I just couldn't believe what I was seeing," Tanya Lee, a mother with a 7-year-old son in tow, told the Herald. Lee said she was heading for brunch on nearby Queen Street when the monitors caught her attention. "[It's] not something you want kids exposed to and it's also embarrassing for Auckland as a tourist destination," Lee added, describing the images as "totally inappropriate and offensive." Of course, not everyone felt that way. "Some people were shocked, but others just stopped and watched," said Dwayne Hinango, a security guard for another local business, who said he spent two hours viewing the hardcore footage. It remains unclear how the footage wound up on the store's video system, and the ASICS store manager who gave his name only as "John" said he was "100 percent sure" no one on his staff was responsible. "Head office and our IT team have begun a full investigation into what happened and who uploaded the page," John told the Herald. And speaking of embarrassing situations, a similar one hit closer to home, as drivers on I-75 north in Auburn Hills, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, got their own hardcore treat last night, as an electronic billboard near the I-75/M-59 interchange displayed scenes from hardcore videos on both sides of the billboard—and of course, cellphone videos immediately went viral on social media. "I was just looking up at it and I was like, ‘Huh, oh, wow. That’s porn!’” driver Chuck McMahon told news station WDIV. "We immediately contacted our emergency contact to shut it down at that time,” said Ryan Gagnon, lieutenant for Auburn Hills police, after receiving several reports of the incident. “We know it was displayed for 15 to 20 minutes but it could have been longer." Police believe the billboards are owned by a Canadian firm variously reported as Triple Investment Group or Triple Properties, and police stated that they have been in contact with that owner to assess responsibility. "It is a crime; we have local ordinances associated with the display of pornographic materials.” Gagnon said. “We are currently trying to determine how this happened, if it was internal, a mistake or if someone was able to hack into the system." Reporter Dawson White of the Miami Herald did a bit of investigation and noted that "In May 2015, an electronic billboard in Atlanta displayed a number of sexually explicit images," which were investigated by the FBI; that "In 2016, a 24-year-old IT analyst was arrested after officials say he hacked into an electronic billboard in Jakarta, Indonesia, and streamed a pornographic video because he was 'bored in traffic,'" and that the Pornhub home page was "projected on an electronic information display in 2018" in Perth, Australia—thus completing today's world tour of porn-displaying billboards. Pictured: Screengrab of a cellphone video of the I-75 porn billboard