Police: Hacker Posts Racial Slur, Alarming Message on Road Signs

Gwinnett County officials are looking at increasing security measures after someone apparently tampered with temporary electronic road signs to make them display racist and alarming messages earlier this week.

The programmable signs, located at a road construction site in the Norcross area, had messages which read “Ebola Outbreak Ahead” and “Send the N*****s North,” according to police.

The signs were altered sometime between 5 p.m. Tuesday evening and 7 a.m. Wednesday morning, police said.

The signs, called variable message boards, were located at an ongoing DOT project on Old Norcross Road near the intersection of Ingram Road, according to the Gwinnett Police incident report. The unwanted messages were changed by a technician before cops arrived on scene Wednesday morning.

One witness, who saw the signs on her way to work around 4 a.m. Wednesday, told WSB-TV she considered the incident a hate crime.

“We have enough stuff going on right now,” Jennifer Bock told the TV station. “You have this KKK stuff going on right now and it’s crazy.”

According to the incident report, the trailer-mounted signs have computers and keyboards that are used to change the displayed messages. The computer was not locked Tuesday evening and they were not damaged in the incident, police said in the report.

A representative of the contractor, Construction Management & Engineering Services, told police the signs were rented from Bo Phillips Company. A Bo Phillips rep told police the signs were accessible by using the original factory password, and it was likely that “multiple people on any given jobsite” might know it.

“He also advised it did not take a particularly high level of familiarity with the devices to access and alter the message. However, some level of familiarity by the suspect was likely,” the police report stated.

No suspects were immediately identified. “No recently fired or disgruntled employees came to mind,” the incident report stated.

Gwinnett County manager Glenn Stephens told the Gwinnett Daily Post the county is discussing changes to pre-construction procedures to prevent a recurrence.