This kind of sounds like viral marketing for season 3 of Mr. Robot, but it’s actually all too real.
Early Saturday morning, a hack resulted in Dallas’s tornado sirens going off repeatedly:
Dallas officials blame computer hacking for setting off emergency sirens throughout the city early Saturday.
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.
If you’ve never heard a tornado siren, it’s eerie, and when they go off with zero obvious cause, doubly so.
Well, ya finally woke up the kid in a panic. pic.twitter.com/bN0WA9i84w
— Robert Wilonsky (@RobertWilonsky) April 8, 2017
Some people in Dallas freaked out, flooding 911 lines:
Even as the city asked residents not to dial 911 to ask about the sirens, more than 4,400 calls were received from 11:30 p.m. to 3 a.m. — twice the average number made between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., Syed said.
The largest surge came from midnight to 12:15 as about 800 incoming calls caused wait times to jump to six minutes, far above the city’s goal to answer 90 percent of calls within 10 seconds.
“We understand that people were concerned,” Syed said. “We had people asking if we were being attacked because of what’s going on overseas.”
Here’s a graphic, because pictures help:
Everything we know about the hacking of Dallas' emergency #sirens last night: https://t.co/4NwI27ICi0 I am also a little tired. pic.twitter.com/ktDamzBWgC
— Robert Wilonsky (@RobertWilonsky) April 8, 2017
That’s a lot of sirens! At least it only went on for an hour or so, and it wasn’t on a weeknight. But, as you might imagine, that someone could hack the emergency system like that is disconcerting, especially because it was apparently done via local, physical access to the system.
That actual 911 calls were pushed down the queue due to this is enough to justify fairly harsh punishment if the hacker is ever caught, although scaring dogs all over Dallas for nearly an hour is probably also a crime.
If it isn’t, it should be.