Seems like this time a Hacker was able to keep people awake at night, although not for much long.
A city in which previously the Traffic signals were hacked and were used to display jokes on the street of the city by an unknown hacker again becomes a victim of a hacker.
In Dallas, a hacker hacked the Emergency Siren System of the city which were used to alert residents to take shelter from bad weather, triggering intermittent false alarms for about an hour and a half until officials deactivated the system early Saturday morning.
The person or people responsible were able to hack into a part of the system that was communicating with all 156 of the city’s sirens, said Rocky Vaz, head of the city’s Office of Emergency Management in a news conference.
The sirens were activated from around 11:39 P.M to 1:18 P.M, all the 156 sirens of the city were turned on at once in a loop of 15 times each siren of 90 seconds which lead the people to go crazy thinking about what exactly has happened. The 911 help center received around 4500 calls between the time period of 11:00 PM to 3 AM which is almost double of the calls received in the normal days.
“We can state at this time that the City’s siren system was hacked Friday night. For security reasons, we cannot discuss the details of how this was done, but we do believe that the hack came from the Dallas area. We have notified the FCC for assistance in identifying the source of this hack. We are putting in safeguards to ensure this type of hack does not happen again.” reads the Dallas online bulletin.
“We can’t talk a whole lot about the hack itself, because obviously we don’t want this to happen again,” said the city Spokeswoman Sana Syed.
The Technicians of the Office of Emergency Management said that they switched the sirens off as soon as it was possible and further said that they will implement more safeguards to make sure any such event does not take place in future.
Maybe the hacker who hacked the Traffic signals and the emergency Sirens be same? Well, it’s not yet cleared.