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posted by takyon on Monday April 10 2017, @12:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the ultimate-shouting dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 10 2017, @04:34PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 10 2017, @04:34PM (#491713) Journal

    Several problems

    The authority's focus will, naturally, be on apprehending and punishing the guilty party.

    Their focus will be to find a scapegoat. Probably a low level employee. It will get headlines. The Mayor can claim he solved the problem and will get a photo op shaking the president's tiny hands.

    If the things are hooked up and accessible from the internet, the design is all wrong.

    Design problems can be fixed. First, do not run telnet on the standard port. Run it on a non standard port so nobody will ever find it. Secondly, it should require a password between four and eight characters, uppercase only.

    Cue the apologists pointing out that authorities should be able to access the system at a moment's notice from anywhere in the world. Like - it's not possible to actually have someone on duty somewhere in the city to flip a switch at the appropriate time.

    Here lies the biggest problem of all. Worldwide access is clearly necessary by your argument alone. Here is how that will go. City hires someone to be on duty to flip a switch. That person is unreasonable and expects that they should make enough money to eat and live in a cardboard box. So their job is outsourced to Elbonia. Thus the switch to be flipped is remote and internet access is required.

    End result:
    After punishing a scapegoat, an expensive contractor will be selected to create the solution described above with a remote switch in Elbonia, internet access to the sirens using the improved security measures described above.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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