A group of hackers have managed to gain access to a prominently placed advertising billboard located in the crowded Republic Square in the center of Belgrade, Serbia. For a while the billboard displayed the Pirate Bay logo alongside Ghandi's quote "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The people responsible for the stunt claim the hack was done to demonstrate how little attention people pay to IT security.

The Pirate Bay is known for its technical ‘playfulness’, as was demonstrated earlier this week with a hack which led many to believe that the site had moved to the dictatorial waters of North Korea.

In the same tradition some computer science students took over a prominently placed billboard at the Republic Square in the center of Belgrade, Serbia.

Dressed in an appropriate “Keep Calm and Seed” shirt, one of the guys used his smartphone to play a game of Space Invaders on the meters-wide screen with a fellow student. After that, they displayed several other messages on the billboard including a “hacking4fun” banner.

What caught our eye, however, is the massive Pirate Bay logo that was displayed. The iconic ship appeared alongside a quote The Pirate Bay has borrowed from Mahatma Gandhi on few occasions: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Hacked

Initially the Serbian media attributed the hack to “Anonymous” but the students explain to TorrentFreak that they are in no way affiliated with any known hacker groups.

“When we started with this hobby, we noticed that a large number of computer systems are very poorly protected or even have no protection at all from some very common attacks that hackers usually use,” one of the students told TorrentFreak.

“In a world where information is freely available, it is easy to learn just about anything, including “how to hack.” We therefore feel that awareness needs to be raised about this general disregard for computer security,” he adds.

In the process, the students decided to give The Pirate Bay a bit of support.

“We strongly believe in the right of free speech and are against any form of censorship. The Pirate Bay is the closest we have to a free, apolitical independent worldwide organization that supports these values and we simply felt the need to support it in some way,” we were told.

The student says that they merely wanted to demonstrate how vulnerable IT systems can be. Nothing was ‘broken’ and the company that operates the billboard has been informed about the holes in their system.

Whether The Pirate Bay received a local visitor boost after this display is unknown. Not that it’s needed, as the BitTorrent site already is the 21st most visited website in Serbia. However, the Pirate Bay team did appreciate the hack from their Serbian friends.