Goatse: Horrifying Meme or Federal Terror Menace?

Nobody like Goatse. Nobody. The memes it has spawned are certainly amusing, but that original picture is pure nightmare fuel. If for whatever reason there were people in the affluent Buckhead section of Atlanta that had not been exposed to Goatse prior to last week, they can now join the ranks of can't-unseers everywhere when the image was splashed across a billboard. 

According to Gawker (link below), a clever hacker changed the image on the digital billboard to Goatse for a period of time last week, which inadvertently exposed flaws in the advertising company's security protocols. 

The billboard above is one of the thousands of YESCO digital billboards installed across the country. Naturally, it comes with an internet connection. The setup is exactly as insecure as you’d imagine: many of these electronic billboards are completely unprotected, dangling on the public internet without a password or any kind of firewall. This means it’s pretty simple to change the image displayed from a new AT&T offer to, say, Goatse.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security are now both involved in chasing down the party responsible for briefly putting the graphic butt meme on a billboard—a poster on Reddit already took responsibility:

Hello friends,

We are the Assange Shuffle Collective, and we’re responsible for the happy afternoon entertainment.Ironically, we didn’t realize that Buckhead was an incredibly affluent neighborhood, which makes the whole thing terrifically good fun. Burn the rich.

But what is there to really investigate? The billboard was easy to mess with; the owners basically left the door unlocked and wide open. Not only was this a case of incompetence, but gross negligence: security researcher Dan Tentler tweeted yesterday that he’d tried to warn this very same sign company that their software is easily penetrable by anyone with a computer and net connection and was told they were “not interested.”

I'm willing to bet they're interested now that a giant gaping asshole has been splashed across one of Atlanta's most well-to-do neighborhoods. At least the federal government is on the case. Now shit should definitely get done. 

h/t Gawker