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BELGRADE, Serbia — Two college students were rewarded with iPads recently after hacking into an electronic billboard and playing a game of Space Invaders.
Ivan Petrovic, 21, and Filip Stanisavljevic, 20, hacked into a billboard in Belgrade, Serbia, and installed the arcade game Space Invaders on it. After playing the game via their iPhones for 20 minutes, they restored it and let the company, DPC, know what they had done.
The thrill of the accomplishment was short-lived, though, after the students' parents and professors admonished them for their actions. Even more nerve-wracking, they were summoned to a meeting by DPC.
The billboard owner wanted only to thank the men, though.
"We suffered no damage, so we decided to give them a mini ipad each," Slobodan Bob Petrovic, owner of DPC, told ABCNews.com.
Petrovic said the students had taught the company a valuable lesson.
"This has never happened before, but we appreciate the fact that these guys have, in a charming way, pointed us to this huge problem," he said, according to Ars Technica. "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."
Petrovic and Stanisavljevic said in a note obtained by Ars Technica that they are not members of Anonymous and are only two computer science students who hacked the billboard "for research purposes."
They said they wanted to demonstrate the lack of security in IT systems in general.
"We wanted to demonstrate how companies sometimes pay very little attention to security — it had nothing to do with this specific company or even billboard companies, but rather any company that uses any form of technology that can be targeted by this kind of ‘attack,' " they said. "We chose the billboard simply because we believed it is the strongest way to prove our point."
