Dallas
Dallas in the midnight area
During the night of 7 to 8 April 2016, many residents of Texas Dallas They jumped out of bed from a loud sound: shortly before midnight, all 156 urban civilian sirens in the city turned on.
Judging from the video, no panic in the city was observed. Citizens perfectly aware that the weather is good. There is no wind, tornadoes are not visible. But the characteristic impression of the end of the world was created: the city at night, and sirens howling on all sides. Surprisingly, the sirens worked an hour and a half – they could only be turned off at 1:20 at night.
Location of civil defense sirens in Dallas. The radius around each siren is 1 mile. The location is chosen so that practically anywhere in the city the distance to the nearest siren does not exceed a mile
Natural disasters in Texas are quite commonplace. The sirens were turned on the previous day just a few days before, when three tornadoes of the weakest categories EF-0 and EF-1 passed through the neighborhoods, having destroyed several houses.
In this case, the weather did not hint at all threat of high winds. In the morning, the citizens could only get lost in conjecture, which meant howling sirens.
Particularly hypocritical comrades were seriously worried: “People asked us questions, maybe we are attacked because of events that occur overseas,” said a representative of the city administration on the following day.
Someone joked about this topic, but many were not to jokes. Thousands of calls fell on the city’s rescue service 911. Peak load was from 0:00 to 0:15 – in this interval, the rescue service received about 800 calls. As a result, the real victims had to wait for up to six minutes on the line while the operator picked up the phone.
At first the authorities announced that activation of the sirens was caused by a malfunction. After almost an hour, they reported that they were working to resolve the problem. This gave birth to a new wave of jokes.
Approximately at 1:20 am, the authorities decided that the only way to stop the noise in the city would be to turn off the radio systems and the repeater – that is, in effect to disable the emergency notification system. After that, the noise completely stopped, said the next day at a press conference, the director of the warning service Rocky Vaz (Rocky Vaz). Thus, the sirens worked from 23:42 (April 7) to 1:20 (April 8).
Also there at a press conference a representative of the city administration said that the activation of the sirens was probably a hack. Authorities exclude remote hacking – they say that someone got physical access to the switchboard, which unites all 156 city civil security sirens. Rocky Vaz says that hacking urban sirens is a very rare phenomenon, and has not yet taken place on this scale. A request has now been sent to the Federal Communications Commission for assistance in helping the perpetrator and seeking an alternative method of emergency notification in the event that civil defense sirens are put out of order.
The warning system remained offline the entire Saturday, as engineers defended switch from future break-ins. It was promised to be operational by 10-11 April, because this week in the Dallas area again are expected thunderstorms.
This is not the first break-in of the urban infrastructure of Dallas. Probably, in this sister city of Saratov there lives a particularly large number of hackers-jokers. So, on May 31, 2016, someone hacked up road text boards and brought out various extraneous messages to them, such as “Work is canceled – go home”, “Bernie’s in the presidency” and “Donald Trump is a werewolf.”
The Texas Department of Transportation stated that the road signs belong to a private contractor, and to physically access the scoreboard, physical access to it is required. Hacker, whoever they are, may face criminal prosecution. Such things do not joke, because foreign inscriptions distract the driver from the road, which means they increase the risk of a traffic accident.
It is interesting that despite the formidable statements of the police, on June 4, 2016, an unidentified joker again began to display extraneous messages on road board. On this day, motorists saw the inscription “The Gorilla deserved it” (a few days before the authorities made a difficult decision and shot a gorilla who took away a 3-year-old boy accidentally trapped in an enclosure – animal rights activists staged a scandal over the murder of a gorilla that
If the distracting messages on the road boards really threaten the lives of people, then the inclusion of warning sirens throughout the city can hardly be qualified as such a hurricane Loe charge. Probably, here the authorities can limit the standard – unauthorized access to computer networks. However, this is only theoretical. The authorities admitted that finding the culprit is like finding a needle in a haystack. There was no trace on the switch of the cracker.
