When electric vehicle owners went to charge their vehicles this week on the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, they received more than they bargained for.
Three charging stations, which were supposed to display the council’s charging network’s website, were hacked to display porn.
The problem was brought to the attention of the affected drivers by the local newspaper Country Press, which subsequently contacted the city government.
“Anyone who found the inappropriate web content,” a representative quickly apologized. Officers were dispatched to inspect the EV signs and ensure that the, well, raunchy content was hidden.
Was the episode amusing to me? No. And the more I thought about it, the less I realized how simple the whole thing was. Publicly displaying pornography is no longer acceptable.
It’s the kind of thing a bunch of adolescents in the 2000s would concoct in their parents’ basement. Honestly? I’m not angry with the perpetrators of the cyberattack; I’m just unhappy that they didn’t choose one of the many better options available to them.
For starters, there’s Elon Musk’s shot with Gishlaine Maxwell. It’s comical how he tried to distance himself from the now-convicted sex trafficker by claiming she “photobombed” him at the Vanity Fair Oscar afterparty in 2014.
Your good friend Ghislaine Maxwell? pic.twitter.com/SA2tzE6fAa
— CEO of Business Corporation Inc. (@HandleOfRy) July 2, 2020
If the hackers really wanted to stay on subject, they could have made Arnold Schwarzenegger into an electric vehicle-loving Zeus.
Alternatively, simply shirtless images of him in his bodybuilding heyday. If they could recreate the scene from Pumping Iron where he claims lifting weights is like “cumming” on repeat, they’d receive bonus points.
It would have been much better if the cybercriminals had gone for a more conceptual approach. Consider putting a message on the EV charger screens that says, “This is now an NFT,” and then photographing the entire scenario and selling it as an NFT.
That, my friends, is some clever meta-stuff.
There’s nothing wrong with watching porn — after all, everyone does it — but the whole “showing some nudie videos in an unexpected area” is akin to Rickrolls: it was amusing ten years ago, but today it’s simply boring.
A valid and serious point
Aside from the jokes, there is an essential lesson to be learned from this story: the security of EV chargers needs to be enhanced.
According to studies, cybercriminals are capable of much more than simply displaying inappropriate stuff on the equipment. They can enter charging point systems to change their functionality, gain access to consumers’ personal and billing information, and potentially disrupt the grid as a whole.
This nefarious cyberattack should serve as a wake-up call. Local governments around the world should focus on addressing station vulnerabilities and reducing security threats before something far worse than a screen showing some pornography occurs.