In an American city, traffic lights have started to discuss politics. A machine uprising?

In April, residents of Palo Alto and nearby towns were surprised to hear voices resembling Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg at crosswalks. These "talking" traffic lights on the famous El Camino Real route began to emit strange and sometimes crude jokes, including mentions of Donald Trump and artificial intelligence. At first, it seemed like a joke, but there was a serious vulnerability behind it.


It has now become clear how hackers managed to alter the audio feeds on the devices. According to information obtained by journalists through requests under California's Public Records Act, the problem turned out to be surprisingly simple. The Caltrans agency, responsible for part of the state's road infrastructure, had not changed the factory passwords set by the manufacturer. As a result, access to the systems remained protected by standard credentials, allowing malicious actors to replace audio files with their own recordings imitating celebrity voices.

These incidents affected Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Redwood City. After the substitution became known, Caltrans temporarily disabled the voice function to stop the playback of fake messages. Later, the audio mode was restored, but work began simultaneously to investigate the causes that allowed such an attack to occur.

Correspondence indicates that the equipment manufacturer had warned Caltrans and the authorities of Menlo Park in advance about the need to use strong passwords. A representative of Menlo Park noted that only devices owned by Caltrans were affected. Caltrans itself confirmed that after checking, other intersections were found where passwords also needed to be changed. They were updated to reduce the risk of similar incidents occurring again.

Interestingly, the "old" systems turned out to be more secure. At the intersection of El Camino Real and Ravenswood, a similar hack did not occur. Ahmed Banafa, a professor at the engineering faculty of San Jose State University, explained that in older solutions, control is often centralized in a block serving several points at once. For a hacker to intervene, they would need to physically open this block and upload data manually. In contrast, new systems use Bluetooth, and one could attempt to connect to them via radio channels while being near the device, for example, with a smartphone.

The most discussed "lines" were heard on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Pedestrians heard Elon Musk's voice talking about Trump, with interjections of other remarks. Another hacked signal presented itself as Mark Zuckerberg and sarcastically commented on the integration of AI into all aspects of human experience, adding that it was supposedly impossible to stop it.

This story has a particularly local context. Musk did indeed live in Palo Alto while working at PayPal, and Tesla's headquarters was in this city for many years. Meta is located in Menlo Park, and Zuckerberg is connected to the region not only by business but also by real estate. However, this "Silicon Valley context" does not change the main conclusion: sometimes loud hacks begin not with clever vulnerabilities in protocols, but with the banal habit of leaving factory passwords unchanged.