Doesn't sound like an important newstory to me.
More like a storm in a teacup. Or considering that this was Dallas, a storm in a can of Lone Star.
Radio hackers set off Dallas emergency sirens at midnight as a prank
Shortly before midnight on Friday in Dallas, Texas, the city's emergency sirens started to howl. Within minutes, all 156 of the sirens were blaring out and residents were starting to panic. The city's 911 emergency response system started to buckle under the strain of concerned residents calling in to report the disturbance. …
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Monday 10th April 2017 19:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
But there was no emergency.
"It's a costly proposition, which is why every dollar of taxpayer money must be spent with critical needs such as this in mind."
Sorry, no can do. Texans don't like regulations, or taxes, or laws, or paved roads, or fire engines that cost money. No, Texans are a can do people and without all these pesky regulations and law and such, why those fine Texan Peoples can spend their money on more important things like giant hats, racist boots, guns, giant hairdos, and not on taxes for socialist contrivances that taxes buy; like roads and fire trucks and people to drive them and such. Oh, Texass! You are so smrt! Just shoot at the danger; tornadoes, storms, fires, ants, people who don't look like you, zombies, etc. That's the Texas Way!
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Monday 10th April 2017 21:21 GMT BillG
Re: But there was no emergency.
AC wrote: Sorry, no can do. Texans don't like regulations, or taxes, or laws, or paved roads, or fire engines that cost money.
Most of Texas government projects are paid for by property tax dollars, which is spent by the county. That's for a very good reason - regardless of country, the higher up your tax dollars go (city, county, state, federal) the more wasted dollars. So keeping the money at the county level is more financially efficient.
When something crosses county lines, bonds are issued. Right now the highways surrounding Dallas/Fort Worth are being rebuilt. No tax dollars were spent, it was financed by a $1.02Billion bond issue. That's right, Texans choose to spend their own money to improve Texas.
By law, Texas runs a balanced budget and occasionally runs a surplus. Dems have, for years, salivated over the wealth & health of the Texas economy and a few years ago they were looking for a way to siphon off Texas' money and, uh, "distribute it to other states" - very highly unconstitutional.
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Tuesday 11th April 2017 16:38 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: But there was no emergency.
Dems have, for years, salivated over the wealth & health of the Texas economy and a few years ago they were looking for a way to siphon off Texas' money and, uh, "distribute it to other states"...
You mean as in federal taxes? Texas sits pretty much in the middle of the pack when it comes to dependence on federal dollars. With some notable exceptions, red states pull more from the federal teat than do blue, so odds are you would only be helping your fellow Republicans should Texas choose to share the wealth.
https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/
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Monday 10th April 2017 19:40 GMT Commswonk
Don't tell me you weren't warned...
"This is yet another serious example of the need for us to upgrade and better safeguard our city's technology infrastructure. It's a costly proposition, which is why every dollar of taxpayer money must be spent with critical needs such as this in mind."
It also illustrates why we need more dollars from taxpayers
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Monday 10th April 2017 19:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
off and on, and off and on again
" city workers had to go around to each siren and turn them off manually, which took until 01.17am on Saturday."
And if I was the suitably irritatable miscreant who did it, i would wait until, well, about 1.27, and do it all again.
Just because I could (and have a appropriate streak of mischief)....... :o)
Seriously, no, this could have had serious consequences and should be another lesson and wake up call to those who applaud the IoT (even though these were not necessarily connected to the internet).
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Monday 10th April 2017 22:42 GMT Adam 1
Re: off and on, and off and on again
No need to do that. If you had read the article byline, you would have noticed that although authorities switched them off, they switched them on again. I'm still unclear after reading the article as to why after going around and switching them off, they turned them back on.
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Monday 10th April 2017 20:04 GMT Kernel
"So 800 people thought the emergency services needed to be told that the sirens had gone off!"
From what I've been able to find with a quick duckduckgo the population of Dallas is in the region of 2.5 million, so 0.032% of them calling in seems to be a very low number of callers.
The kit required to carry out this little prank is probably very portable and will run quite happily off 12 volts, so, provided the perpetrator has half a brain they should be able to get away with this for years - it could even work out that they are never identified or caught and that the only solution will be a more secure activation system.
Catching this person is going to be about as easy as tracking down some random idiot on the CB bands - in fact, it could well be some random CB nutter who's got bored with spouting drunken on air rants.
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Tuesday 11th April 2017 07:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
"So 800 people thought the emergency services needed to be told that the sirens had gone off!"
Or they were phoning the emergency services, to find out why the sirens operated by the emergency services were going off.
And as a policeman once told me, we'd rather a 1000 people phone in with a concern that turns out to be nothing, rather than no one phone in and we are left to pick up the pieces afterwards.
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Monday 10th April 2017 20:19 GMT Brian Miller
using radio waves...
I'm sure that the system was originally set up to be triggered in case normal communications, such as phone lines, etc., were disrupted. Unfortunately, these tend to be fairly simplistic, and of course are inadequate to the ease of being "hacked" by the modern miscreant.
FYI, some 911 systems use VoIP, so a DDOS could also blow that out. In this case, it only took 800 calls before the system was so backlogged that real emergencies had to wait minutes just to talk to an operator. Not good.
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Monday 10th April 2017 22:51 GMT Adam 1
Re: using radio waves...
Good point. Out of curiosity, shouldn't 911 have some sort of redundancy to redirect calls to another call centre somewhere else in the country when the local emergency service isn't able to answer within a couple of rings? At least that's how it works with 000 down under. (Or is that just an unusual over preparedness by us to better handle the risk of a drop bear infestation?)
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Monday 10th April 2017 23:32 GMT Jon 37
Re: using radio waves...
That would require the 911 dispatchers be able to dispatch fire/police/ambulance from a different state / county. It also increases the risk of mistake due to the 911 dispatchers not knowing the distant area well enough, or having communications problems with the distant emergency services.
So (without knowing) I'd guess that countries like the US with more traditions of local decision-making are less likely to do that, whereas countries with a more nationally-standardised service are more likely to do that.
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Monday 10th April 2017 23:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: using radio waves...
"I'm sure that the system was originally set up to be triggered in case normal communications, such as phone lines, etc., were disrupted."
The BBC radio has a system whereby silence on a station feed for a defined short period causes a pre-recorded announcement to takeover at the transmitter.
Broadcasting a certain classical piece of music - which consists of silence for several minutes - was a challenge.
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Tuesday 11th April 2017 11:36 GMT DJ Smiley
Re: using radio waves...
It's a running joke that every year on BBC Radio 1 that they have to disable this system for the minutes silence on 11th Nov.
One year someone did forget apparently, and it kicked in (And they've discussed how every few years it's updated to be (ill)relevant music).
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Tuesday 11th April 2017 07:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: using radio waves...
" it only took 800 calls before the system was so backlogged "
Well lets do a quick calculation
Lets go to for 60 second call handling, 30 second wrap, 95% of calls answered within 20 seconds.
800 in 15 minutes or 3200 in 1 hour.
You're looking at around 88 operators, every single night, just in case someone pay this prank.
This of course excludes any genuine calls, so chuck in a couple more.
That's presuming all calls are simplistic, no one has a break and they work at 100% load.
In reality you'd really be looking at 120 to 150 operators per shift.
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Tuesday 11th April 2017 19:19 GMT Brian Miller
Re: using radio waves...
"You're looking at around 88 operators, every single night, just in case someone pay this prank."
Well, I've called 911 myself a couple of times. Once was for an obstacle dropped on the freeway, and the other was for a prowler. The first was very quick, as other people had dialed it in, so about 10-15 seconds. I would imagine that the sirens would fall into this category. "Is this for the sirens?" "Yes." "OK, we're on it, bye." I'm guessing that Dallas might have 20 operators on duty.
Yes, it would be good if the 911 systems were more unified, so that idle operators in one area could take over for operators in another area. Unfortunately, I know that's not the case. Incidents like this always point out that the 911 system needs improvement.
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Monday 10th April 2017 21:02 GMT harmjschoonhoven
Re: The siren system is designed to be activated when severe storms approach the city.
In Rotterdam we just close the Maeslantkering. The siren system is designed to be activated when the Russians are coming. See https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luchtalarm (in Dutch).
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Monday 10th April 2017 22:01 GMT Dwarf
Lawnmower man
Obligatory reference to the end of Lawnmower man
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Tuesday 11th April 2017 03:42 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
Obligatory: Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes (12" mix). Play loud.
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Wednesday 12th April 2017 03:40 GMT Kernel
Re: Perhaps they also changed the password
Depending on the age of the system (and they're obviously not overly keen on spending money to keep the technology up to date) it is possibly something as simple as a combination or sequence of tones on a specific frequency. The chances are that the frequency used is a matter of public record from the FCC, thus simplifying the problem considerably.
A $50 programmable dual band VHF/UHF Chinese handheld and a RaspberryPi to generate the tones may well be more than adequate for the task of triggering the sirens - it might even be possible to trigger them just by sending the right sequence of DTMF tones from a handheld's keypad.
Just like controlling a repeater, but more fun.......
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
