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US 911 Emergency System Can Be Crippled By a Mobile Botnet (helpnetsecurity.com)
An anonymous reader writes: What would it take for attackers to significantly disrupt the 911 emergency system across the US? According to researchers from Ben-Gurion Univerisity of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center, as little as 200,000 compromised mobile phones located throughout the country. The phones, made to repeatedly place calls to the 911 service, would effect a denial-of-service attack that would made one third (33%) of legitimate callers give up on reaching it. And if the number of those phones is 800,000, over two thirds (67%) would do the same.
It seems to me the phone OS should require user input to initiate a call or send a text, even from an app, as the way to secure this issue.
The article is full of errors, due to the researchers not understanding how the 9-1-1 system works. It only takes a handful of calls, perhaps 3-4 to tie up all the trunks from one call source into the switch that handles 9-1-1 (the switch is called a "Selective Router"). By design, the total number of trunks into the 9-1-1 call center (PSAP) is greater than that, so a single call source can't tie up all the trunks. However, all the wireless carriers use the same two companies to connect their networks to the 9-1-1 networks, and the total number of trunks into the PSAP is usually less than the sum of the trunks from each of these sources. As a result, you need far fewer calls to tie up all the call takers. In a large city, these numbers are bigger, but it's still less than 100. Once you have all the call takers on calls, the next call get's a busy indication. When the call taker hangs up, a new call is presented to them. In the scenario given, if the number of TDoS calls is much greater than the number of legitimate calls, then the probability of a legitimate call getting through is small.
There isn't anything magic about running a DDoS/TDoS attack from a mobile network - they just imagined it would be easy to introduce malware into the Android/iOS systems. You could do it by attacking enterprise PBXs, or VoIP phones, or a cable phone network. Just about anywhere that there is a connection between the phone network and the Internet.
There is a redesign of the system, called NG9-1-1, that has mechanisms to address TDoS/DDoS. It's starting to be deployed, but the mechanisms that are defined aren't being implemented very well and they wouldn't be effective even if uniformly implemented well until we get a decent percentage of PSAPs on the new system.
Perhaps it's time for some American 'researchers' to publicise details on how simple it would be to DoS the Israel 100/101/102 emergency services.
It really should be Open Season with No Bag Limit on people running botnets of any kind.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.