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.

Comments

Re:Radio / TV

[knorthern knight]

> 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.

That's where AM and FM radio excel. Turn it on and listen. They both have longer range than cellphone cells, and continue functioning when the cell network gets overloaded. While we're at it, most smartphones *SHOULD* be capable of FM radio reception. But many smartphones in the USA are deliberately crippled, due to cell carriers demading this from OEMs. This is greed, pure and simple. The carriers want people to pay through the nose for data over-usage, rather than listening to FM radio for free. https://yro.slashdot.org/story...