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Baghdad closes LED advert screens after hacker shows porn film on a screen (iraqinews.com)
93 points by campuscodi on Aug 21, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments



Iraqi here *facepalm* again it's not a spooky cyber attack, it's the stupid way they operate these screens, they use anydesk and teamviewer to control them, they're hooked to windows machines and often times they show the desktop and user/password is displayed on the big screen

Here is a real life pic by a friend https://imgur.com/a/g0LB9vt


it's done exactly the same way in the States. lots of similar photos to show for it. I guess that whole industry just doesn't care.


Thanks! That made me literally laugh out loud.


I was raised in Baghdad, I can assure you the person who set this up knows better, but didn’t care enough or didn’t think other people would know what teamviewer is or both.


Thanks for the laugh.


I wonder how many times do these animated advertisement screens near roads or highways needs to be hacked in a similar way in order to make them disappear. Can they be problematic frequently enough to make the companies just get rid of them?

Wish it was as easy as installing an adblocker.


If I hacked into one I'd turn down the brightness at night. Some of them are brighter than the sun.


If only this was all it would take in the USA to shut down all LED billboards.


Talk about rapid incident response: they cut the power cable! (If it's a careful translation, presumably in contrast to just cutting the power.) It's interesting how priorities dictate whether or not physical damage is an acceptable way to fix a problem.

    The hacker “showed a pornographic film for several minutes before we cut the power cable,” he said.


Ha! I suppose it had to happen eventually. I wonder how long it'll be before this meme spreads and the big boys in street advertising like JCDecaux become targets for hacking.


If only this was just a convenient way to remove a billboard instead of a small part of Iraq's incredibly unhealthy sex culture.


What is wrong with their sex culture?


This is a part of the world where, in the worst cases, female children have their genitals mutilated in the name of religious tradition; and in the average case, adult women worry that if they don't bleed (from a ruptured hymen) during the first intercourse with their husband (who they probably didn't choose to marry), they will be accused of adultery and murdered (for which the murderer can legally be given a reduced sentence).

Just take a look here under "Women’s Rights, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, Morality Laws": https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2022/country-chapters/iraq


So looks like they got breached, wich might explain the Telegram drama, I was wondering why would they choose to specifically ban Telegram but not Signal or Whatsapp, tools of the mossad

I need to dig


The Las Vegas Sphere was powered down during the recent DEFCON conference.

Nothing was officially stated, but it was rumored they didn’t want to risk anything like this happening.


Has anyone modelled the most obvious content onto that largest hemispherical LED display in the world?



They should hook this up to flight data for the nearby airport. Have it watch the incoming planes.


You read my mind!

I feel like they could have done a better job at faking a depth map though.


I was there and watched it display scenes before during and after DEFCON. One of my extended online friendlies started a goof post on Reddit with a $300 reward. There were so many people who claimed they could hack it or would hack it this year and.. no one did.


Knowing casinos, it's pretty likely that they actually have good security.


You can't hack a dumb power switch (or what I assume is a giant breaker)


Yes you can. It's called turning it back on. Getting there is the challenge, but it's not as if defcon is only about digital security


My grandfather owns an RSA decryption tool. He calls it a wrench


Pedantically speaking, that's more of a key extraction tool than a decryption tool as such.

Most efficient, though.


A tale as old as time -

"Police arrested the suspect and said he was a maintenance worker for a firm that maintains billboards in the city.

According to the police, the employee had a financial dispute with the company and, in order to take revenge, showed porn on the screen instead of advertising."

http://kvira.ge/859826 (NSFW maybe?)


[flagged]


given that a suspect was arrested I guess I hope it was mild enough that the suspect, guilty or not, isn't permanently removed from society in one way or another.


Oh he’s getting beheaded for sure.


I think you're pretty bent if you're hoping that children were exposed to public porn of any sort.


not to encourage a race to the bottom, but 'being exposed to pornography' is pretty low on the list of risks to youth as far as Iraq is concerned. [0,1,2,3]

[0]: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/iraq/publication/ecd201... [1]: https://www.humanium.org/en/iraq/ [2]: https://www.unicef.org/stories/displaced-children-iraq-tell-... [3]: https://iraq.un.org/en/235063-more-9000-children-have-been-k...


No disagreement from me.


Pretty sure that children of any sort deal with it better than people that hate porn for an ideological reason.


> It's ok to show porn to kids, and if you don't want to, you're a bad person.

This is the state of leftism in 2023.


Murdeeing people okay for all ages. Making people is the devils. A sign of a sound mind with decent morals.


> you're hoping that children

Why bring the children in to this?


>The Iraqi government, which is dominated by pro-Iranian parties, has targeted several YouTubers and TikTokers since last year, accusing them of sharing “indecent content” that goes “against morals and traditions”.

>Some of them have been imprisoned, including a young woman who posted videos dancing to pop music.

This was a protest. Protests are supposed to be uncomfortable.


Easy for you to say when you're sitting behind your screen most likely in a Western country. The people of Iraq have suffered for decades at the hands of occupation, constant bombardment, instability, poverty, sanctions, and more. Give them a break. Some of the comments here, like the GP post are quite sickening.


Given that they were exposed, I’m just expressing an opinion about what sort of porn to hope it was.




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