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We’re all used to flashing signs on the highway. “ROAD WORK AHEAD,” some blare, while others offer pithy reasons to buckle your seatbelt. But on one stretch of Phoenix road early Wednesday morning, drivers got a much different message.
Around 2 a.m. near the southbound Camelback Road entrance to Interstate 17, a portable road sign was hacked to read “FUCK ISRAEL SAVE GAZA.” In a video shared online, an Arizona Department of Public Safety vehicle can be seen parked nearby, its lights blaring.
Footage of the sign was shared by the Instagram account phx_news_photog and later reposted to X.
Sign hacked pic.twitter.com/YyFyBLQChl
— itsallphoenix (@itsallphoenix2) October 23, 2024
Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza has resulted in more than 40,000 people dead, including many women and children. Israel launched the war in response to a surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023, by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 people hostage.
Protests over the war roiled Arizona State University’s campus in April and also have erupted at Kamala Harris events across Arizona.
Eric Andrews, a spokesperson for DPS, said a state trooper reported the sign to the Arizona Department of Transportation, which oversees highway signs. ADOT spokesperson Steve Elliott said the sign, which has been corrected, belongs to an ADOT contractor and is in place for a fog-seal project on I-17.
“We have counseled the contractor on the need to be vigilant about securing portable message boards, and the contractor is upgrading passwords and locks,” Elliott said in an email. He also added, “We want to emphasize that this did not involve ADOT’s system of freeway digital message signs.”
It’s not clear how the sign was hacked. However, according to StateScoop, highway signs can be surprisingly easy to reprogram, often “by somebody exploiting the device through a factory-default password that’s been widely distributed around the internet.”
