Pedestrians crossing a street in Denver, Colorado, got rather more than they bargained for last weekend, when the audio signals at two crosswalks began broadcasting a political message alongside their usual walking instructions.
“The walk signal is on, f*** Trump. The walk signal is on, Trump murders children”
That was the rather blunt message being played in a robotic voice to surprised pedestrians as they walked down East Colfax Avenue, Denver, according to numerous posts shared across social media.
It’s a tale that should sound familiar to regular readers of Hot for Security. For instance, just last year we reported on a very similar wave of crosswalk hacking, n which pedestrians in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Seattle were startled to hear deepfake audio impersonating tech giants Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos.
A security researcher had previously demonstrated that it was trivially easy to reconfigure the audio used by crosswalk systems made by Polara, because installers had not bothered to change the default password.
Fast forward to 2026, and local media reports suggest that the newly-installed crosswalk units in Denver were similarly accessed due to their use of factory-default credentials.
In other words, here we go again. Same vulnerability, different crosswalk.
The affected crosswalks in Denver – intended to help people with visual impairments safely cross navigate intersections – had been recently installed at the junctions of East Colfax Avenue with North Pearl Street and North Washington Street, according to Nancy Kuhn, Communications Director at Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.
She told The Denver Post that the devices were not yet supposed to be operational, but had recently been turned on while still using their factory settings.
Passwords on the affected crosswalks have since been changed, and police say that they are investigating the matter.
While it’s easy to discount such attacks as mischievous pranks, there is a serious impact to hacks like this. After all, the audio of a crosswalk is something that people who are blind or are visually impaired depend upon for their safety. Tampering with them – whatever the political motivation – introduces a hazard, and cash-strapped city authorities are forced to spend time and money fixing them.
None of which, of course, ignores the fact that the underlying vulnerability is entirely preventable. Default passwords have plagued all manner of technology, including crosswalks and other roadside infrastructure in the past.
