Pedestrians crossing a avenue in Denver, Colorado, received relatively greater than they bargained for final weekend, when the audio indicators at two crosswalks started broadcasting a political message alongside their standard strolling directions.
“The stroll sign is on, f*** Trump. The stroll sign is on, Trump murders kids”
That was the relatively blunt message being performed in a robotic voice to shocked pedestrians as they walked down East Colfax Avenue, Denver, in accordance with quite a few posts shared throughout social media.
It is a story that ought to sound acquainted to common readers of Scorching for Safety. For example, simply final yr we reported on a really related wave of crosswalk hacking, n which pedestrians in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Seattle had been startled to listen to deepfake audio impersonating tech giants Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.
A safety researcher had beforehand demonstrated that it was trivially straightforward to reconfigure the audio utilized by crosswalk techniques made by Polara, as a result of installers had not bothered to vary the default password.
Quick ahead to 2026, and native media reviews counsel that the newly-installed crosswalk models in Denver had been equally accessed on account of their use of factory-default credentials.
In different phrases, right here we go once more. Identical vulnerability, completely different crosswalk.
The affected crosswalks in Denver – supposed to assist individuals with visible impairments safely cross navigate intersections – had been not too long ago put in on the junctions of East Colfax Avenue with North Pearl Road and North Washington Road, in accordance with Nancy Kuhn, Communications Director at Denver’s Division of Transportation and Infrastructure.
She informed The Denver Put up that the gadgets weren’t but alleged to be operational, however had not too long ago been turned on whereas nonetheless utilizing their manufacturing unit settings.
Passwords on the affected crosswalks have since been modified, and police say that they’re investigating the matter.
Whereas it is simple to low cost such assaults as mischievous pranks, there’s a severe affect to hacks like this. In spite of everything, the audio of a crosswalk is one thing that people who find themselves blind or are visually impaired rely upon for his or her security. Tampering with them – regardless of the political motivation – introduces a hazard, and cash-strapped metropolis authorities are pressured to spend money and time fixing them.
None of which, after all, ignores the truth that the underlying vulnerability is completely preventable. Default passwords have plagued all method of know-how, together with crosswalks and different roadside infrastructure up to now.
