Palo Alto and Menlo Park crosswalks were hacked in April to play fake, satirical messages from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Hackers were able to do this because Caltrans just never changed the default factory passwords.

Everyone got a good laugh in April of this year when hackers reprogrammed the audio of Palo Alto and Menlo Park crosswalks to play fake AI-generated voices of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, in messages that ruthlessly mocked those billionaire boy-kings. “Hi, this is Elon Musk,” one Palo Alto crosswalk said. “Welcome to Palo Alto, the home of Tesla engineering. You know, they say money can’t buy happiness. And, yeah, OK, I guess that’s true; God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, and that’s pretty sick, right? Fuck, I'm so alone.”

@bulou.varanisese #FYP #Paloalto #SiliconValley #ElonMusk #Cybertruck ♬ original sound - Frances | Silicon Valley SF

We are now learning there was an additional and quite hilarious fake Elon Musk message at another crosswalk. “You know, it’s funny, I used to think [Trump] was just this dumb sack of shit. But when you get to know him, he’s actually a really sweet and tender and loving,” that fake Musk crosswalk message said. That was followed by a fake Trump voice saying in the background, “Sweetie, come back to bed.”

This information comes to us from the Palo Alto Daily Post, who did a California Public Records Act request to find out if those cities and the crosswalk administrators at Caltrans ever got to the bottom of how the hack happened. It turns out they did get to the bottom of it, and the hack was amazingly simple.

“Caltrans didn’t change the passwords for the crosswalks that the manufacturers set, making them vulnerable to hackers,” the Daily Post reports.

Yes, Caltrans just kept the factory default passwords on these publicly used systems. Additionally, these new crosswalk systems are controlled by Bluetooth, so the hackers likely performed the prank with regular old smartphones. Older crosswalk systems had a central box which would have required physically breaking into.

NBC Bay Area spoke to San Jose State technology professor Ahmad Banafa on the security, or lack thereof, that allowed hackers such easy access to reprogram the crosswalk signals.

“This is not high-tech hacking, This is basically hacking because somebody left the door open,” Banafa told NBC Bay Area. “The weakest link in any cybersecurity system, in any network, is the human.”

Palo Alto residents were more amused than alarmed by the caper.

“I think it's more of a funny prank,” resident Daniel Martin said to that station. “Now if they told people to cross when the [traffic] light was green, then I would say that was a malicious prank.”

So basically, Menlo Park and Palo Alto simply got lucky that the hackers in this case were more practical jokers than bad players hoping to disrupt city infrastructure. But the security screw-up was still galling, and exposed that those pedestrian and traffic systems could be manipulated to deadly ends if more malicious actors were involved.  

Related: Hackers Reprogram Peninsula Crosswalk Signals to Mock Elon Musk and Zuckerberg [SFist]

Images: Left (Bulou Varanisese via TikTok), (Right) GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN - MARCH 30: Billionaire businessman Elon Musk arrives for a town hall wearing a cheesehead hat at the KI Convention Center on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The town hall is being held in front of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election between Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel, who has been financially backed by Musk and endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)