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US Hacker Sets Off 156 Sirens At Midnight (dallasnews.com)
"I had the displeasure of being awoken at midnight to the sounds of civil-defense/air-raid sirens," writes very-long-time Slashdot reader SigIO, blaming "some schmuck with a twisted sense of humor." The Dallas News reports:
Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas' Office of Emergency Management, said that all 156 of the city's sirens were activated more than a dozen times... Dallas officials blame computer hacking for setting off emergency sirens throughout the city early Saturday... It took until about 1:20 a.m. to silence them for good because the emergency system had to be deactivated. The system remained shut down Saturday while crews safeguarded it from another hack.
The city has figured out how the emergency system was compromised and is working to prevent it from happening again, he said... The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday.
City officials reported 4,400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously.
The city has figured out how the emergency system was compromised and is working to prevent it from happening again, he said... The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday.
City officials reported 4,400 calls to their 9-1-1 emergency phone number in the first four hours of Saturday morning, with over 800 occurring in that first 15 minutes when all 156 sirens started going off simultaneously.
There have been recent reports of problems with the Dallas 911 infrastructure causing hold times and delays which resulted in deaths. This may have been an attempt to further highlight the problems.
I've seen municipal systems that were set up years ago without any hardware firewalls, just Windows XP. They ignored my advice to harden the systems. It's alarming that towns are not fully proactive about their municipal Internet-of-things. This alarm system in Dallas is simply mischief that points out the flaws in one system. Other systems, some critical to a town's functioning, are still vulnerable. Politicians are mostly dumbasses that run on ideas, but once in office are dumbfounded, dazed and confused., on all levels of government.
Having in the past been "one of those weird people interested in warning sirens as a hobby", I have a fair bit of knowledge to how insecure their control systems actually are, and thus how trivially easy it is to compromise them. Although security is slowly improving, a lot of older siren systems are controlled using unencrypted analog radio signals transmitting standard DTMF (telephone-type) tones. For a malicious person, it is shockingly easy for them to turn on an off-the-shelf police scanner, find the frequency used to control the system, record the activation signal (such as during a regular monthly test), then at a later time use an illegal transmitter of some sort to rebroadcast that recorded activation signal on the same frequency over and over. I do not know what control method Dallas uses for their siren system, but the fact that one of the news articles (CBS News) I read about this said the FCC has been asked to help investigate leads me to believe more than likely such an attack was utilized...and this isn't the first time such has happened.
>"How does this work in the US ? Here around in Europe, the authorities are supposed to immediately broadcast informations about the alert on all available channels (TV, radio, web, public announcement systems, etc.) "
Correct, that is the way it works here. If sirens go off, you are supposed to seek out a broadcast to determine the nature of the emergency. Where I live, it is always a weather emergency (like a tornado warning; and no, even though we don't live in "tornado alley", several touch down every year).
They are also used for nuclear power plant incidents, extreme thunderstorms, hurricanes, and civil defense.
So the sirens sound, and presumably the North Koreans have a nuclear strike on the way. And what do the good citizens do? _nothing_. Only 4400 actually tried to figure out what was wrong; the rest simply ignored it.
You might as well get rid of the entire system, nobody cares about it anyway...
Considering that the sirens are to get people indoors in the event of Severe Weather and that most people were probably indoors when they went off, it's not surprising they did _nothing_ apart from what they are supposed to do - monitor radio and television.
Dallas outdoor warning sirens.
I
To make it worse, now mostly mundane stuff has become an "ALERT!!!!!111!!!", which contributes to giving everyone alert fatigue, and when something real happens, they don't even know if they are supposed to care?
Exactly this. We've gotten so many alerts that we gave up and turned them off. And most were stupid. Most are too far away, most are false alarms, like when a woman thought her kid was abducted by her Ex, and it turned out the little girl had gotten in the car, took it out of gear, and the car drifted down the driveway and into the nearby woods. Even so, that alert was like 200 miles away.
We had one right in our neighborhood when a little boy was a couple minutes late walking home from school. Full alert with the dogs and police and rescue groups activated. Turned out the reason he was 5 minutes late was he stopped to talk to a friend. So 10 minutes after the alert, it was called off. And my alerts were all turned off.
Society might be happy to go insane, And turn it up to 11 on everything, but I don't feel like participating.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Don't laugh, but that's actually how the sirens in my county are activated. Each fire station's siren has a tone pair along with an all siren tone pair and a cancel tone pair for the all call tone. For an auto accident you usually get (not sure of the order) Siren Tones, Fire Pager Tones, EMS Pager tones, and a human decoded auto accident tone. This is simulcast from two sites on the main frequency (not sure if the other UHF system is still active) and the audio is carried on the digital P25 dispatch talk group.
Oh and we don't use what the people in the business call VHF (15X to 16X MHz range) we use Low Band (3X and 4X MHz Range).
sudo mod me up