Posted on 04/11/2017 8:05:39 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Dallas' emergency warning sirens, like many across the country, are radio-controlled and activated via encoded transmitters that act like pagers, sending tones to receivers attached to each siren. In Dallas' case, security experts say, it appears that someone took control of the frequency and transmitted the tones that turned on all 156 sirens across the city.
Broadnax said he was "leery about [sharing] how these systems work," citing security concerns. He would confirm only that "it's a tonal-type system."
In Moore, Okla. — a town in Tornado Alley that relies on sirens for weather emergencies — a base radio station is set up in a secure location. An employee activates the system, and the radio sends out an encoded message via the airwaves. The sirens then receive the message, decode it and start to wail, said Gayland Kitch, director of emergency management for Moore.
It's likely that whoever activated Dallas' 156 sirens did so by compromising the city's infrastructure and gaining access to the codes, said Jeff Schilling, who has a background in military communications and is now chief security officer of Armor, a cloud security company based in Richardson.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
Lovely.
L
If they find the culprit, he should sit in jail a minimum of 10 years. The millions of people who are in tornado country depend on the sirens to save their lives. It is not a joke to mess with that warning system.
I was a newsman in Dallas at the most popular radio station in 1971.
I was alone in the newsroom on
February 20.
On that morning at 9:33 AM Eastern time, Telex machines in every broadcast station in America that was part of the EBS suddenly rang urgently with ten successive bells–a signal only used for an imminent EBS warning.
It then spit out a sheet reading, “This is an Emergency Action Notification directed by the president. Normal broadcasting will cease immediately.” The telex included the code word, “Hatefulness.”
I opened up an envelope that contained a verifying word for the code word, and there it was. Hatefulness.
Trying to remain calm, I went into the control room and showed Weaver Morrow, the morning DJ, the message. He turned pale.
Dallas is just a stones throw from Carswell AFB, a SAC base for nuke armed B52s, and ideal nuke target.
It was a weekend and over half of the city was listening to the station at any given moment. We decided not to air the announcement we were ordered by the government to broadcast because of the panic it could and probably would create.
We called station management and they agreed. We believed if a nuclear attack had already happened somewhere on US soil or one could be pending here and possibly any minute, why create chaos. We just waited for the late morning flash of an exploding sunrise at Carswell to the west of us.
About 15 minutes later the AP and UPI telex machines printed in capitals that the message was a mistake
People were doing that with tape recorders and old taxi radios back in the 70s. Much easier now because you can buy the radios for $25 instead of having to know anything.
Wait til they send out the test signal every week or month, record the tones, then play them back at will. Trivial.
Wow!
This does not sound very secure. I think they were using an old paging type system to set these off. All you have to do is transmit on the correct frequency and generate the right tone. This could be done by someone who copied the signal the last time it was used or found the documentation somewhere.
This is the same technology that has been used since the 60’s or 70’s to let Fire and Rescue squads know that there was a call. This one used the general alarm code instead of the tones for a certain station. Think of the old TV show Emergency and that distinctive sound was a pager tone that set off the station buzzer.
You are correct. It was impish. I still have the Presidential directive and the codeword print.
There is audio out there of a very shaken announcer at WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana who DID break-in with the alert, and then spent a very nervous eight minutes or so on the air before getting the all-clear.
Someone at NORAD scrooood-up by sending out the actual attack code and not the test.
It was reported on tv (no, don’t remember which evening news station out of Austin or which evening) that they weren’t interested in who did it. Seems hinky.
Really?? You admit that you overrode an apparently legitimate message from national command authorities. That was still the era where people had their own fallout shelters and many had storm cellars that did double duty.
Life around Carswell would have sucked if they got nuked but Dallas and the listening area covered a much wider and more survivable area if some people sheltered and there was an attack.
You had no way of knowing why the alert was released. What if it could have been something else, like a broken arrow at Carswell or in the surrounding area? That could have resulted in a risk to the population served by your station but not lethal if simple sheltering indoors was appropriate.
You and your station did not act responsibly and were in violation of your FCC broadcast license agreement...
Or maybe this is all just a "war story".
Recall, Saturday was the normal day for a weekly test via the teletype system. An actual alert message was issued (I head that the tech pulled the wrong punched tape down and fed that into the machine instead of the test tape) a please cancel the test message was issued. But it was not a test that could be canceled, because it was not a test. Then they had to issue a full cancellation message to cancel an alert.
I too was working that day, at a TV station in Indianapolis. We did stay on the air, I covered the shift at our co-owned radio station while the announcer there tried to track down more information for us.
The primary station for the Indianapolis region activated the EBS (five seconds no carrier, five seconds carrier, five seconds no carrier) then ran silence while awaiting more information to come.
IMPISH:
inclined to do slightly naughty things for fun; mischievous.
“he had an impish look about him”
synonyms: mischievous, naughty, wicked, devilish, rascally, roguish, playful, sportive;
Shorts a little tight?
Why do they design and implement systems that have so little security? Anybody can transmit all the possible codes, and eventually hit the right one. Like voice mail systems with a four digit code. Just send all 10,000 numbers and you’ll hit it.
(Design the system so a failed attempt makes you wait 30 seconds. The third failed attempt 1 minute, and so on. Use a really long code word.)
Just jihadies testing defenses. But it’s Dallas they’ve got much bigger fish to fry. Like tax-payer funded trips for the elected to the hottest vacation spots to study something.
I remember when that happened and it was a nation-wide alert.
As I recall, the big concern in Washington afterwards was that
the emergency warning was almost completely ignored, and they
wondered what good the system was if no one took it seriously.
People had been Pavlov-trained to ignore them as the EBS Tests were happening all the time.
Same thing will happen to the EAS system if they keep using it for every missing child at Walmart.
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