A young woman going by the name of Tottenhoph was told by her dad that 'I'll bet you can't hack that'.

So she explored the security vulnerabilities of the growing number of electronic billboards and presented her findings to a group of security engineers and hackers at Defcon 16.

Currently there is only one company with a digital billboard network within the US and they are quickly expanding to Europe and Japan. They use different manufacturers for their billboards which means that there are different designs and specs but she discovered three main types of billboards.

The first uses the Verizon telephone network to update the images and cycles on the billboard. Ironically the interface is housed in a box at the base of the billboard with no lock on the box, written instructions inside of the box and open connectors.

The second is a wireless satellite uplink. These seem to have unencrypted wireless traffic. This means that there is no lock on the data. No encryption what so ever must mean, similar to no lock on the access box, that the billboard owners do not value their infrastructure and revenue stream. Either that or they haven't much experience with technical security issues. For example with the wireless network with no encryption a hacker could capture packets to see where the billboard is broadcasting to, spoof that IP address and then upload their own advertisements. The last type of billboard she researched was a direct connection where anyone could walk up and plug their laptop into the billboard to control the images displayed.

This box was secured with an off the shelf master lock. These locks are known to be easily picked or simply cut with a bolt cutters. In her investigations she only found one security camera pointed at the billboard at each site with no barrier or security perimeter around the billboards which are often located near roads and are often deserted.

Like a good security researcher she also explored the potential physical vulnerabilities such as sales people (social engineering) who gave information on image specs, uploading information, and some security procedures. As a budding security researcher she speculated on the fact that this company seemed to have limited awareness of the potential for misuse of their growing and lucrative market in electronic billboards.  X