Why a Group of Hackers Is Playing Porn on Digital Billboards Around the World
· Vice
While there are hackers out there causing mayhem as they remotely disable supermarket refrigeration units across Europe, there are more playful, more mischievous hackers out there filling video billboards around the world with porn. CNN recently reported on an Egyptian highway billboard that was loaded with some porn, but that’s just one instance. Gizmodo has compiled an ongoing list of digital porn plasterings across the globe, capturing the work of a merry band of internet freaks.
Reports detail how drivers on Giza’s sprawling 26th of July Axis in Egypt had their commutes suddenly made much more visually interesting by explicit porn videos being played on a massive highway LED billboard. As Gizmodo points out, similar impromptu porn sightings have popped up across Malaysia, Brazil, and reportedly in Iraq and China, leaving local authorities scrambling for a power cord to yank.
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Hackers Are Filling Public Billboards With Porn, and Their Reasoning Is Surprisingly Political
Unlike the hacked refrigeration units, whose perpetrators authorities worldwide are still trying to unmask, a group has taken full credit for the horn billboard hacks. Based on the app Telegram, the crew operates under tags like “Leakers$” and “@LeakersGov.” A group representative quickly pointed out that while it may sound difficult to hack a billboard in a foreign country, it’s actually quite easy and, according to the representative, can be done by “anyone with two brain cells.”
Speaking to news outlet The Cairo Report, the group’s representative said that the group ran a scan that uncovered thousands of commercial display networks at work wide open on the public Internet with no basic security protections. So they filled them with porn.
Beyond bringing porn to the masses, the group does have some political messaging here, ensuring that they let everyone know that “Egypt remains under a dictatorship. The government maintained its power through repression, while the country struggles to move forward; years pass, but nothing changes in people’s lives don’t improve.”
That, paired with the fact that the group is not looking to make any money off of this via ransoms, it seems like it’s the group trying to remind those of them exerting their authoritarian control that there are always limits and loopholes to their powers. Also, CNN uncovered a funny stat given the context of the story, but it turns out that Egypt is “among the top 20 countries visiting pornography websites in 2025, according to Pornhub Insights. The United States ranked first.”
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