Prankster hacks LED scroll near Oberoi Mall, posts lewd message

Expletives were scrolling on the loop on the LED board right in the middle of the road, left the citizens upset. Khairnar, however, told the police that he was informed by the traffic police officials at the Oberoi Mall chowkie about the lewd message on display

Mumbai Sometime last week, a prankster with a ‘high’ sense of humour hacked into the LED board installed by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) at the Haji Ali junction and left a message ‘Smoke weed every day’. Citing ‘technical fault’ the LED display, being operated by L&T (Larsen and Toubro), was shut down.

Just last week someone had hacked the LED board near Haji Ali

Now, the Dindoshi police are on a look out for the prankster who hacked the LED board on the junction of Oberoi Mall. This time, however, the message on the LED scroll is filled with expletives and unmentionable words.

Dindoshi police swung into action after BMC’s junior engineer Shubham Deepak Khairnar (25) approached them on Saturday and registered a case against the unknown hacker under sections of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

Expletives were scrolling on the loop on the LED board right in the middle of the road, left the citizens upset. Khairnar, however, told the police that he was informed by the traffic police officials at the Oberoi Mall chowkie about the lewd message on display. The two boards in the vicinity, installed and managed by Negative Carbon Enterprises Ltd, generally delivers social messages. Th hacked board normally warned motorists to maintain speed limit.

“The second board on the traffic pole displays a message on Covid precautions. The LED display is mounted on the smart traffic pole which is managed by Negative Carbon Enterprises,” said Dr Chandrakant Gharge, police inspector of Dindoshi police station. Khairnar also told the police that the display message on the boards has remained unchanged since 2020.

Police officers said that the prankster has used the identification of an employee to enter the company’s server and change the message. “Negative Carbon Enterprises manage the servers of the computers managing the LED boards. We are now investigating who could have used the computers connected to the LED boards and whether an outsider has remotely hacked the system.

“We are in the process of getting details of people who have logged in to the computers used to manage the display boards and corroborate their log to find out whether it is an insider job or a hacker who has managed to change the message,” said Gharge.

An official from the P South ward of BMC said, “These boards are new technology signages which can be updated using internet from our office itself. We use it to change messages as per our need. This one (near Oberoi Mall) was hacked by someone and it will not be tolerated. We have registered an FIR and we are also investigating at our end on what safety measures can be taken.”