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Students hack billboard to play ‘Space Invaders,’ rewarded with iPads

It isn’t very often that hackers are rewarded for their efforts outside of events like the HackDays held across Canada. But for two students in Belgrade, it looks like their devious efforts have paid off.

As Ars Technica reports, Ivan Petrović, 21, and Filip Stanisavljević, 20, hacked into an electronic billboard in a busy plaza in Belgrade, playing Space Invaders on the screen from their iPhones, and closed their brief demonstration with the message “Hacked4Fun.”

In the description on the YouTube video, the pair explain that they don’t consider themselves hackers in the negative light with which it has come to be associated. They say they were merely trying to draw attention to a security flaw common to these kinds of billboards and they contacted the owner to tell him what they had discovered.

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The billboard owner reacted very positively to their actions. “This has never happened before, but we appreciate the fact that these guys have, in a charming way, pointed us to this huge problem,” Slobodan Petrovic, manager of DPC, the company that operates the billboard, told Serbian news site Kurir. “Now it is clearer than ever that we need to protect ourselves better. In more developed countries, these actions are unthinkable because of severe sanctions.”

While DPC responded positively, the pair, dubbed in Serbian media as “bad hackers,” was fearful at first they may need to leave the country.

“One thing we learned is that this kind of public hacks are not good for us,” Petrović told Ars Technica. We were so stressed. Especially me, I was feeling bad when all the bad news started. At first, we were portrayed as some kind of ‘Anonymous’ group. We were surprised – we showed our faces [in the video], we didn’t want to hide. The first night we were thinking about running out of the country. We wanted to go to Montenegro – but we were not sure, but we were talking about that.”

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Instead of having to leave Serbia, however, the two computer science students were rewarded with a pair of iPad Mini 4Gs by DPC, which wanted to thank the two for pointing out the security flaw in such a non-destructive way.

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