Fake Cellphone Emergency Alerts About Zombies and Nuclear Attacks Predicted (backchannel.com)

"No matter how solid the system is, history reveals that false alarms -- of zombies, nuclear attacks, missing children -- are inevitable," warns an essay at Medium. An anonymous Slashdot reader summarizes the article: New York's police department is hailing emergency alerts as "the future" of government communications to citizens. But could the same system be used by scammers directing millions of people to a malware-installing site, or "a terrorist intent on causing mass panic (i.e., 'Tsunami imminent, evacuate immediately')... If the government can reach us at any time, who else can?"

The article runs through great moments in the history of false alerts -- including a 1971 incident where the national warning system mistakenly sent out the pre-nuclear attack warning, "normal broadcasting will cease immediately," and warnings in 2013 about zombie attacks in Montana, New Mexico, and Michigan. "To tell anybody that an agency is immune to these attacks would be a grave injustice," said the IT overseer at Iowa's Department of Public Safety.

Comments

Potential problem is a bit limited though.

[LithiumLand]

Even if this did happen, I'm pretty sure that the emergency alert handlers would very quickly send out another emergency alert warning to not waste your time crying in the basement or to not visit that malicious website.

Re:Potential problem is a bit limited though.

[ShanghaiBill]

The public is quickly being conditioned to just ignore the alerts. All the alerts that I have received are about some kid kidnapped hundreds of miles from where I live, with no useful information other than the color of the car. Like I am supposed to call the police if I notice a silver car with a kid in it? Later on the news, I find out that the kidnapper was the non-custodial dad trying to get his child away from an abusive alcoholic mother.

Re:Potential problem is a bit limited though.

[PPH]

We apologize again for the fault in the alert. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.

a few fake alerts

[turkeydance]

would turn them into car alarms.

Re:Fake nuclear attack story

[LithiumLand]

Possibly even "terrorism" charges?

Hah!

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

>and warnings in 2013 about zombie attacks in Montana, New Mexico, and Michigan. "To tell anybody that an agency is immune to these attacks would be a grave injustice, I think most governmental agencies would be well prepared in case of zombie attacks. But I guess claiming immunity to them would be over convidence

Re: Hah!

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Sorry for bad formatting. The comma should be the end of the quote, not starting my response. I forgot I was on Slashdot and need the bulleted return html tag.

The sooner the better

[Kohath]

Get cracking people. Someone needs to warn about the extraterrestrial infiltration of the TSA and their plan to scan everyone to find the best subjects for abduction and probing. It might as well be you.

These ridiculous government institutions maintain popular support because they haven't been thoroughly exposed as failures. Hurry up and expose them.

Re:The sooner the better

[Jzanu]

Welcome to Federal PMITA prison for inciting massive national riots, and say hello to Bubba.

We have the technology!

[wbr1]

Just make sure that the encryption keys for such a system are stored in a 'safe' key escrow system. Then we know it's safe from hackers. /Sarcasm

I predict....

[thegarbz]

I predict medium will publish another worthless opinion piece no one cares about before the end of the week.

Mine are disabled

[Snotnose]

If these are the emergency alerts I think they are, I disabled mine after some Megan's law alert 3-4 years ago. It was at 3 AM. For something 500 miles away.

I was lucky in that I'd left my phone in the living room that night, but the internet was all over it and within 5 minutes I'd disabled those damned things.

Re:Mine are disabled

[dgatwood]

Same here, and for the same reason. And I also disabled the Amber Alert on my weather radio for the same reason.

Any automated system like this needs to be a heck of a lot smarter about alerts during hours when most people are normally sleeping. An Amber Alert might be a life-or-death emergency for the kidnapped kid, but it is not a life-or-death emergency for people who are in bed asleep. I mean, it isn't as though someone is going to hear that alarm and immediately jump out of bed, get in his or her car, and start driving around looking in driveways for the suspect's vehicle....

Worse, many people have to drive late in the evenings, which means those alerts going off early in the morning can actually put lives in danger that were not in danger previously by disrupting people's sleep in ways that puts them at elevated risk of getting into an automobile accident. That makes this feature of cell phones a very dangerous tool to activate overnight. After the third early-morning wakeup in a row from a combination of two Amber Alerts and one telemarketer phone call, I turned Amber alerts off everywhere. So any good that they could have done by me knowing about them went out the window because they were too much of a nuisance.

IMO, cell phones should be aware of whether the device is in your house charging or is actually in use, and for any alert that does not constitute an immediate danger to the phone's owner, should wait to sound the Amber Alert alarm until the user picks up the phone. After all, Amber Alerts, when delivered to people who are outdoors, in their cars, or on their way out of the house is clearly useful, but for everyone else, they're a nuisance with essentially zero chance of helping anyone.

Re:Mine are disabled

[ShooterNeo]

Yep. I turned them off because I just don't really see the details of other people's cars when I'm driving. At most I just think of them as car/truck/18 wheeler, and as obstacles to be avoided. So there could be "silver cadillac plate number XXX-XXX" as an alert, and I could be right behind it on the highway for an hour 15 minutes after receiving the alert, and I just wouldn't see it.

You know...amber alerts + autonomous cars would actually work pretty damn well. Machine vision, of the quality needed to drive an autonomous car, is more than good enough to read the license plate and to identify the color and probably usually the make/model of a given car your autonomous car can see. If the alerts went right to the computers of autonomous cars, and autonomous cars who think they detected the matching vehicle sent automatic texts with the photograph of the vehicle back to the government, it would actually work. I mean, other than the dystopian possibilities, ofc.

Re:Mine are disabled

[dgatwood]

Honestly, I think the main benefit of those alerts is to freak out the people driving the car, making them think that they're about to be spotted, thus increasing the likelihood of them leaving the kid on the side of the road.

It's as we've always feared...

[Karl Cocknozzle]

"Robot Richard Simmons on rampage downtown, highway closed, divert via bypass."

In this wierd election year

[Applehu Akbar]

If a zombie nuclear alien warning were to be broadcast, the public would respond...Meh!

Zombie alerts probably accident rather than malice

[J. T. MacLeod]

I can absolutely see the public getting zombie alerts... but by accident rather than as a prank.

I was involved in setting up these alerts at one mobile carrier. What do you think our test messages said? We lived in fear of accidentally sending our zombie alerts to the general public... but that didn't keep us from using it in testing.

Re:Fake zombie alerts ...

[Bob_Who]

I don't want to be alerted about FAKE zombies, just the REAL ones so I know who is running for Congress.

Re:Fake nuclear attack story

[fustakrakich]

... we begin bombing in five minutes

Seen this a few years back in Austin...

[mlts]

In 2009, in Austin, someone rewrote the messages on some traffic signs to alert about zombies. This has popped up on occasion. (Currently, there are news alerts to be watching for people dressed as clowns that are menacing elementary schools, so zombies are out of fashion right now.)

It does make me wonder how one can tell if there is a real zombie invasion. I'm guessing if there are a lot of people staggering around, and it isn't an ACL or SXSW weekend, one might worry.

So, who actually signs up for these things anyway?

[RockDoctor]

I know I've not given anyone permission to send me messags like that. And if they did start sending them, they'd pretty soon start getting some rude messages back.

Re:Fake nuclear attack story

[nobodie]

This is part of the plot for a comedy movie at the time (1966). I forget the name, but remember some of the faces of the actors. All I remember was "Emairgency, Emairgency, Everyone is to get from the street!" repeated ad nauseum and burned into my poor childish brain. Google saved my brain, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" was the name of the movie and you tube has some clips. Enjoy campy humor.