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Local Emergency Alert System Hacked, Warns Dead Rising From Graves
First time accepted submitter Rawlsian writes "Great Falls, Montana, television station KRTC issued a denial of an Emergency Alert System report that 'dead bodies are rising from their graves.' The denial surmises that 'someone apparently hacked into the Emergency Alert System...This message did not originate from KRTV, and there is no emergency.'"
If it was a Common Alerting Protocol-enabled system, it was entirely designed to be on the internet.
Supposedly this is the capture of the hacked broadcast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc60XPCXrh8
The preceding line was intentionally left blank.
It's been a few years since I worked down there, but EAS always seemed like pretty primitive tech. One of the last remaining bastions of serial printer ports as I recall. It is (or was a few years ago) ugly, annoying, tended to chop the ends off of messages, and many of the weather service alerts either were for somewhere entirely remote from us, or were so garbled that they were incomprehensible.
I'm entirely unsurprised that it's easy to hack in to EAS.
Three Squirrels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28e0IqIgPc -- KRTV out of Great Falls, Montana.
You don't need to be on the internet to have a "hack".
i.e. The road sign hack was actually funny the first time. :-)
https://www.google.com/search?q=l4d+road+sign+zombie+hack&tbm=isch
All the stores are back-orderd on ammo.
All they would have had to do was walk a little bit faster!
All stations share their EAS infrastructure. The largest stations get their data direct; smaller stations get it from larger ones. All stations need to have at least two different data sources set up. It is actually a reasonably well set up topology, and it is tested on a very regular basis.
The FCC also imposes strict fines on anyone who fails a test; the base fine for a violation is $8,000 and is scaled up for repeat or blatant violations.
How the FCC handles fines in this case will be interesting. The EAS system is designed for speed and reliability, not for security; there is message validation built in to prevent unintentional activation, but a correctly-formatted bogus message inserted into the system will propogate as designed.
I find nothing in that citation to indicate that Assange has been charged with any offence. On the contrary and to quote directly: "Assange has not yet been formally charged with any offence."
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
And they said I was crazy preparing my zombie apocalypse survival kit.
Hardly. Even the top levels of the US government recommend being prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse. I mean, this is the same group of folks that wants you to get a flu shot.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assange_v_Swedish_Prosecution_Authority
Assange fled Sweden rather than defend himself against the charges.
Hmmm
Except that is not correct, he did not flee, he left Sweden legally. It was only after he had left Sweden that the new prosecutor issued a new arrest warrant.