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Dallas authorities said that the entire tornado alert network came online as a result of a hacker attack.
As more and more studies line up to say that the average US adult doesn’t get enough sleep at night, a recent event shows that even following the doctor’s advice can be impossible if someone decides to toy with you. According to Mike Rawlings, the Mayor of Dallas, the entire emergency tornado sirens went off during Friday night and remained active for one and half hour before the engineers managed to trace down the issue. Rawlings confirmed that the sirens came to life as a result of a hacker attack.
According to Rocky Vaz, the acting director of Dallas’s Office of Emergency Management, on Friday night, at approximately 11:42 pm, the entire tornado, and other weather emergencies network, which includes 156 sirens, came online. Between 11:42 pm and 1:17 am, the tornado sirens continued to blast off the emergency signal.
Naturally, the concerned citizens of Dallas dialed 911 in an attempt to discover why the tornado emergency system went off. The consequence of this rather peculiar event was that the entire emergency line was flooded by calls, pushing the normal 10-second wait time up to a staggering five minutes.
In fact, according to the Dallas Emergency Dispatch, approximately 4,400 calls were registered between 11:42 pm and 1:17 am. Of course, even the social media channels started to wake up and to boil over this event that kept the Dallas citizens on their toes for an hour and a half.
Vaz declared that his engineers confirmed that the alarms went off as a result of tampering. It would appear that one or more individuals tapped into the network’s grid and managed to inject a repeat command, meaning that the sirens were stuck on a loop, transmitting the emergency tornado signal over and over again.
After some efforts, the engineers managed to locate the malicious command and to purge it out of the system. At the moment, the Dallas Office of Emergency Management is coordinating the effort with the Police Department in an attempt to seize the individual who hacked the network. So far, they’ve been unable to identify the culprit, but they’ve managed to establish that the loop command was inserted from somewhere in Dallas.
Meanwhile, Mike Rawlings, the Mayor of Dallas, declared during a press conference that, in light of the recent events, the need to upgrade the existing security grid grow direr. Rawlings pointed out that this move might be costly, but at least will prevent such thing from ever repeating.
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