Russian police have arrested a hacker who projected a pornography video on a giant digital billboard, sparking late-night traffic chaos along a busy Moscow road.
The January 14 stunt caused one man to have a fatal heart attack and left commuters too stunned to move, reports say.
Driver Alyona Prokulatova told the Associated Press she was "so shocked that I couldn't even shoot video or take a picture of it".
The video showed a man and a woman having sex and ran for about 20 minutes, according to witnesses. The electronic billboard sits above Moscow’s Garden Ring Road, 9m-wide by 6m-high, and normally plays advertising clips.
"Within three minutes we found it out, and within 15 minutes the screen was shut off," the Moscow city advertising committee’s deputy head, Alexander Menchuk, was quoted as saying by Interfax.
Police yesterday arrested a 40-year-old unemployed man over the stunt. The unidentified man allegedly admitted hacking into the server that controls the billboard "to give people a laugh".
"He is a highly-educated, temporarily unemployed and extremely advanced internet user," a police spokesperson said.
"The hacker replaced one of the commercial video files on the [billboard's video] playlist with an adult video."
The man said he originally planned to play the video on televisions in a Moscow shopping centre and did not intend to let "thousands of people see the porn flick in the centre of the city".
He is yet to be charged but could face up to two years in jail over the incident.
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