For about 5 minutes last Friday afternoon, a huge LED billboard at a major intersection in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, displayed a Japanese pornographic film. Those five minutes of footage not only broke the Indonesian Internet, it also launched a criminal investigation into who was responsible for the public porn display that shocked the capital.
Police have already questioned 10 people in relation to the case, eight of whom work for the advertising company in charge of placing content on that particular billboard, PT Transito Adiman Jati.
While many speculated that the adult display was the result of simple incompetence on the part of a soon-to-be-fired employee, the management of Transito Adiman Jati is claiming that it was not an inside job but the work of malicious porn-happy hackers.
“We had time to detect that [our system] was taken over by somebody who sent a virus. It was sabotage, we were hacked,” Adrian Wiedarta, manager of Transito Adiman Jati, told Kompas yesterday, adding that his company was fully cooperating with the police in their investigation.
According to Adrian, a hacker apparently infiltrated their system using a virus which not only gave them control over the display, but locked them out of the system by changing the password. That is supposedly why they could not shut down the porn video manually and power had to be cut off from the display in order to turn it off.
A special cyber-crime unit from the police is currently examining computers confiscated from the company to determine who was responsible, and thus criminally liable, for the incident.
If indeed it was the work of an outside computer assailant, the hacker has apparently not publicly taken credit for the shocking display nor demanded money to prevent another similar hack.
Meanwhile, Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama said he would work to dismantle all Videotron billboards in Jakarta, starting by not extending the permits on any of the existing displays. He said this was not simply due to the last Friday’s incident, but also because he believes large billboards are generally a nuisance that can harm people living in cities.
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