Random Funniest Hacker Attacks (15 items)

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  (#1) The Spanish PM Was Replaced With Mr. Bean On An Official Site

  Anyone visiting the official European Union website for the Spanish Prime Minister in 2010 came face-to-face with a strange surprise. Rather than a picture of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, visitors instead saw a picture of the British sitcom character Mr. Bean. Newspapers previously likened Zapatero to the character, possibly prompting the anonymous hacker to carry out the attack. According to the authorities who ran the site, the hack took advantage of a vulnerability known as cross-site scripting.
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  (#2) The Vogue Website Was Filled With Accessorized Dinosaurs

  One hack discovered in 2013 on the Vogue website, as well as others owned by Conde Nast, involved dinosaurs. Inputting the famous Konami code on the keyboard while browsing the site led to dinosaurs appearing across the screen wearing various types of hats and headwear.

  To this day, no one quite knows who carried out the attack. Some suspect an employee for the company, as this would have made it much easier to hide as an Easter egg of sorts rather than a genuine attack.
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  (#3) Donald Trump’s Twitter Was Filled With Lil Wayne Rap Lyrics

  My Twitter has been seriously hacked--- and we are looking for the perpetrators.

  — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2013

   

  Although most people are used to Donald Trump posting bizarre stuff on Twitter, things took an especially strange turn in 2013. An unknown attacker managed to get control of the account and post their own messages online. The most prominent of these happened to be a tweet containing lyrics from a Lil Wayne rap song, with the message reading, "These hoes think they classy, well that's the class I'm skippen.”

  Trump regained control of the Twitter account some three hours later and let everyone know the search for the perpetrators was on.
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  (#4) Operation Cupcake Changed Bomb Instructions To Cake Recipes

  Security services do an important job of taking down propaganda and information from terrorist websites. MI6 from the UK achieved this in a rather unique way back in in 2011. Rather than just take down the instructions for making pipe bombs from an online al-Qaeda magazine, they simply replaced the instructions with recipes for cake. Anyone looking to create explosives would instead only get the recipes for cupcakes taken directly from Ellen DeGeneres's "Best Cupcakes in America."
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  (#5) Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were Forced To Play AC/DC

  Many suspect government agents and civilian hackers of attempting to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program by hacking into its facilities. While most of these stories fail to make headlines, one particular attack caught the attention of the media in July 2012 for its eccentric consequences.

  According to reports, two buildings suffered from a hack that played the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC over the speakers non-stop. The music continued to play into the night and could not be silenced. The worm reportedly also attacked the automation network, though that probably felt less annoying to workers than hearing THUN - DAH deep into the night.
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  (#6) Hackers Ruined Scientology’s Google Results

  When the Church of Scientology tried to take down a video critical of Tom Cruise on YouTube in early 2008, a group of hackers gave a rather mathematical rebuttal. These anonymous attackers caused no harm to the church when they Google bombed it. By shifting the church's Google rankings, the hackers made it so that when a user searched "dangerous cults," the first result to come up happened to be the Church of Scientology's website.
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  (#7) Hacked Road Signs Showed Hilarious Messages

  Road signs play an important role in traffic management, informing drivers of obstacles ahead or the duration of a construction project. However, they make incredibly easy targets to hack thanks to the fact operators rarely change the system's default password. Even if the password happens to be changed, simply pressing "shift" and "ctrl" and typing out "DIPY" will reset the password back to "DOTS."

  This led to a spate of hacks in the late 2000s where pranksters put their own messages onto the machines. Passing drivers, likely confused as hell, saw anything ranging from jokes to song lyrics and even warnings about incoming zombies.
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  (#8) Students Posted Fake Announcements On A News Channel

  Local news stations often have a system in place for local businesses and organizations to announce closures due to bad weather. In 2004, one such system on North Carolina's News 14 suffered a security flaw which allowed students at North Carolina State University to post their own messages on the ticker of the news channel. Once a message got reviewed and approved, it could be changed without any further interaction from a member of the station. This allowed the students to alter the ticker to send rude messages directly over live television through messages that, technically, were already approved.
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  (#9) A Security Expert Sent A Cheeky Warning To Printer Owners

  After discovering a number of printers came with a security flaw, one security expert hijacked more than 150,000 in February 2017 in order to send their owners a warning. The hack came shortly after a study appeared online showing how certain printers would allow access to attackers over the internet because the devices keep ports open by default.

  Exploiting this very vulnerability, the hacker sent out messages that automatically printed out when the printer turned on. Some even included artwork of a small robot to add some extra humor. Perhaps most surprising was the benevolence of the hacker, whose prank still informed users to "for the love of God please close this port."
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  (#10) Hackers Plastered Bored Teenagers Over Lenovo’s Website

  When news got out in 2015 that Lenovo laptops came with Superfish malware pre-installed, certain groups decided to take revenge. Using a popular hacking technique known as DNS hijacking, Lizard Squad managed to re-direct visitors to the Lenovo website to one the hackers controlled. The group plastered the secondary website with pictures of seemingly bored teenagers, which feels extra savage on the part of Lizard Squad. Songs from High School Musical also played in the background, y'know, just because.
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  (#11) Britney Spears Became A Member Of The Illuminati, At Least According To Her Twitter

  Britney Spears has been the butt of more than one Twitter hack, but the best and most notorious was in 2009 when an anonymous troll somehow managed to change her profile into an Illuminati account, making it seem like she actually might be one of them. Tweets included messages like, "I give myself to Lucifer every day for it to arrive as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!" as well as, "i hope that the new world order will arrive as soon as possible! -Britney"

  Her web team stepped in, however, removing the tweets, cleaning up her profile, and posting a clarifying tweet of their own. Spears has never again spoken of this alleged time in the Illuminati, but that perhaps only serves to thicken the conspiracy.
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  (#12) Samy Made Everyone His Friend On MySpace

  Samy Kamkar took advantage of a vulnerability on the social media website MySpace in 2005 to create the fastest spreading virus of all time. Within a day of its release, the virus infected some one million pages of the site. Fortunately, the attack came with no truly harmful effects. Those exposed to it were forced to send a friend request to Samy’s own account and would display a message on their own page that stated "but most of all, samy is my hero.”
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  (#13) The Burger King Twitter Account Got A McDonald's Burn

  If a hacker takes control of a major fast-food restaurant's social media account, the obvious next step involves changing their name and photo to that of their biggest rival. This exact scenario happened to Burger King in February 2013, when an unknown attacker accessed the Twitter account for the chain. Rather than do anything malicious with this information, they decided to troll the account instead. This resulted in several messages claiming the company had been sold to McDonald’s, and a change of name and picture to match the legendary golden arches.
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  (#14) The World's First Technological Hack: The Marconi Telegraph Troll

  In 1903, the "father of modern radio," Guglielmo Marconi, was stationed on a cliff ready to demonstrate his new-fangled telegraph to the Royal Academy of Sciences. As he braced his fingers, ready to send a message more than 300 miles across the airwaves, the machine at the receiving end of the communication began pulsing strongly. The decoder  spelled out the pulses into "RATS" several times before the messages launched into a seemingly random limerick. "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily," it pronounced rudely, before launching into other miscellaneous quotations. It turned out a wireless engineer named Nevil Maskelyn from the Eastern Telegraph Company had set out to prove a point: that these telegraph messages weren't private. Indeed, they weren't.
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  (#15) A Road Sign Spoiled Movie Endings

  Of all the major internet offenses, spoilers rank among the most grave. On the fast-paced realm of social media, spoilers come without warning and can be difficult to avoid. Two artists, Stegan Byrd and Wes Eastin, made trolling an IRL sport in October 2012 when they hacked road signs and replaced traffic updates with movie spoilers. Referencing the movie Looper, the pair wrote “LOOPER/SPOILER ALERT/BRUCE WILLIS DIES” on the sign to ruin the film for everyone driving through the Atlanta, GA area.

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