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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.
He's a dick who doesn't give a shit about endangering people who really need emergency services.
Dear Texas: you have shit security and morons managing it. This is dangerous. I sounded the appropriate warning systems.
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.
People, people, people, when the emergency sirens are sounding, the authorities already know about the emergency. You don't need to call 9-1-1 to tell them about it, really.
People are so incredibly stupid.
Everywhere has shit security. Every manager is a moron. Everything is dangerous.
A door being unlocked does not give one the right to steal what's behind it, and similarly having a vulnerable system does not give one the right to attack it.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
On the one hand, you have a low-damage attack that has happened once in a few decades. On the other, you have the real cost of continually upgrading and hardening (and re-hardening) a system over those few decades, taking funding away from other public programs.
As a taxpayer, I'm okay with risking an unscheduled wakeup, if it means my local high school gets an arts program. As a security expert, I'm still okay with the low risk of leaving such vulnerabilities open, as long as they aren't able to be used as staging for other attacks.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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...
You know Russia has subs parked on every undersea communication link that the US has right? The first blow in any war will be the US having its metaphorical eyes, ears, and tongue hacked off.
Hence the interest in satellite-to-satellite communications.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I like the way they blame the unknown entity "hackers" rather than accept responsibility for their own lax security. First and foremost it is their fault for running an open system. The hackers should be sought but first and foremost the problem is lax security.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
In these days of shifting from "Cable is King" to Cord Cutters... well, as far as I know, they did get the cable companies to put emergency interrupt capability in every fucking channel. But it's a bit hard to do that with Netflix, or even an https request.
And the problem with disaster emergencies is that they are so infrequent that the mindless masses have no clue what to do, because it hasn't happened since the last Oscars, and that's as far as they can remember before their ADD kicks in and they start wondering what all the gossip page celebrities are doing.
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. But a siren going off while they're trying to sleep? In the land of people calling 9-1-1 because their fast food isn't fast enough?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }