The pedestrian crosses system that is used in several cities in Silicon Valley was hacked as a mockery of the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Spacex -in addition to the owner of Twitter -. Cloned by artificial intelligence: “It is normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated when we insert the AI by force in every aspect of your conscious experience,” says one of the recordings, with the voice attributed to a fictional Zuckerberg. “I just want to make sure there is nothing to worry about, because there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.” The hackeos occurred in Menlo Park (Meta headquarters, Facebook owner), Palo Alto and Redwood City, cities of the state of California del Silicon Valley, heart of American technology. Musk’s companies have their headquarters in another state: the city of Austin, Texas. Another Audio, this time with the voice of Elon Musk, ironizes: “They say that money cannot buy happiness … I suppose it is true. God knows that I tried. But you can buy a cybertruck, and that is quite good, right? The P *** Mother, I am alone.” The pedestrians were surprised by the truth with which the recordings sound and began to upload them to social networks. In a video posted in 2024, the security specialist Deviant Ollam explained that these types of devices can be vulnerable if the default passwords that they bring from the factory are not changed. That is, a bad initial configuration practice can open the door to this type of interventions. Clarín contacted Dan Burgogno, a Cordoba cybersecurity researcher, a specialist in hacking this type of systems and devices, to understand how the operation of these systems can be altered. APS), they allow an operator to make modifications: change languages, sounds, volume, behavior, firmware update, bluetooth connectivity and access to an audio library with preloaded sounds. Indicate how to connect to the device, manipulate and configure it. Very weak and easy to guess password. This left an open door for anyone to connect through the app, access the device and raise the sound they like best, in this case an audio generated by artificial intelligence, ”he closed. If well, he is not yet known for sure how the attack was, in this way it is possible to exploit the system. The company that manufactures these buttons, called Polara It is still not clear who was the author of the hacking or what their motivations were, everything indicates that it was an act of hacktivism. The local medium Palo Alto Online, one of the first to report the fact, quoted a Redwood City official who confirmed that the city “is actively working to investigate and solve the problem as soon as possible.” According to that medium, the manipulation of the devices could have occurred on Friday.
