HackingHackers activate Dallas’s emergency sirens system

Published 10 April 2017

Near midnight on Friday night the residents of Dallas, Texas were startled when, simultaneously, 156 emergency sirens sounded the unmistakable warning alarm. Dallas officials soon discovered the reason: The city’s alarms system had been hacked. Dallas’s mayor Mike Rawlings said: “This is yet another serious example of the need for us to upgrade and better safeguard our city’s technology infrastructure.”

150 Dallas sirens sound for hours // Source: ttu.edu

Near midnight on Friday night the residents of Dallas, Texas were startled when, simultaneously, 156 emergency sirens sounded the unmistakable warning alarm.

Dallas officials soon discovered the reason: The city’s alarms system had been hacked. The New York Times reports:

The alarms, which started going off around 11:40 p.m. Friday and lasted until 1:20 a.m. Saturday, created a sense of fear and confusion, jarring residents awake and flooding 911 with thousands of calls, officials said.

Sana Syed, a spokeswoman for the city, said in a telephone interview that the sound of the sirens, which are meant to alert the public to severe weather or other emergencies, was interpreted by some as a warning sign of a “bomb or something, a missile.”

Rocky Vaz, director of Dallas’ Office of Emergency Management, told the Dallas News that investigators have concluded “with a good deal of confidence that this was someone outside our system.” Syed told reporters, “We do believe it came from the Dallas area because of the proximity to our signal you need to have in order to pull it off.”

The Dallas News reports that Dallas’s mayor Mike Rawlings, on his Facebook page, posted a message calling the hack “an attack on our emergency notification system.” Rawlings added: “This is yet another serious example of the need for us to upgrade and better safeguard our city’s technology infrastructure.”

Suspicious minds were quick to question the assertions of the city’s officials.

“To me, this looks like one of the more effective white hat hacks of all time,” Rhett Jones writes in Gizmodo:

It’s all too clear these days that it’s difficult to get the attention of politicians when they need to improve cyber security. What better way to sound the alarm about a vulnerability than to use the city’s own, incredibly loud warning system to do it? “We will work to identify and prosecute those responsible,” Rawlings wrote. Or maybe, identify and hire this person?