Starting shortly before midnight Friday, emergency sirens all over the Dallas, Texas started blaring even though there was no emergency:
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.
Officials don't know who was responsible for the hacking, but Vaz said "with a good deal of confidence that this was someone outside our system" and in the Dallas area.
Deactivating the emergency alert system was the only way to stop the sirens:
The system remained shut down Saturday while crews safeguarded it from another hack. The city said the system should be restored Sunday or Monday — in time for thunderstorms that are expected to begin rolling through the area early next week.
[...] Dallas officials said they have begun working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to add an alert system that would send messages to all cellphones in the area when there is an emergency.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Monday April 10 2017, @02:21AM (2 children)
It's probably not a question of the switch, but a question of the 150+ pairs of wires (dedicated pairs!) that one needs to drag across the whole city to those sirens. That would be quite expensive, point to point! Likely the sirens are connected to the Internet (at the nearest cell tower, for example) via a very simple gateway (SCADA?) that has minimum security. One can also understand why - the device should be as reliable as possible, and you do not want to deal with updating certificates and fixing whitelists of IP addresses of control stations. Probably they have some sort of password authentication that is weak, or have too many ports open that are vulnerable. Does the city government employ rocket scientists to design these boxes?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geezer on Monday April 10 2017, @12:37PM
Back in the 1950's/1960's, the civil defense sirens were activated by a dedicated phone line and a simple relay. The ring tone voltage latched one relay, hangup let an old dashpot timer break the latch. Simple and effective, at least till the first warhead lands.
Anyone remember CONELRAD (AM 640 and 1240)? Jeez I miss the cold war.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday April 12 2017, @12:38AM
You think so? My guess is that in most municipalities, the sirens date back decades and probably use a fairly simple mechanism to turn them on/off that predates the whole idea of the internet.
I'd say it's reliable, but then again I've never understood why they feel the need to test the system every week.