By infrastructure-hacking standards, the overnight triggering of the Dallas storm-warning system on April 7 was relatively benign.
Starting at about 20 minutes before midnight more than 150 sirens across the city of 1.3 million people blared periodically, alarming residents in this tornado-prone part of the country.
Worried that something was amiss, locals overloaded the city’s 911 emergency-calling system, causing what could have been harmful delays, while officials scrambled to figure out what was going on. They shut down the system at 1:17 a.m. and worked overnight with West Shore Services, a Michigan-based company hired by the city last year to maintain the network, to fix the problem, according to local news reports.
Initially officials suspected a technical malfunction, but by Saturday afternoon it was clear that someone in the area had duplicated a radio signal used to trigger the sirens. It took city officials most of the weekend to put the system back online, and as a temporary fix they added a layer of encryption to the transmitters on the sirens, making them harder to hack.
“This is yet another serious example of the need for us to upgrade and better safeguard our city’s technology infrastructure,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wrote on his Facebook page.
“It’s a costly proposition,” he added.
Indeed, municipal connected or wireless infrastructure offers an enticing target for hackers because cities typically lack the funds to constantly upgrade their networks with the latest security features. And as cities become “smarter” with more connected and wirelessly controlled devices, the risk to public infrastructure will increase, providing hackers more opportunities and security specialists more business. The growing number of connected devices, including everyday objects with the ability to “communicate” with other devices and be part of what’s known as the internet of things, is exacerbating these concerns.
“Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for issues like this,” Billy Rios, a cybersecurity researcher and founder of advisory firm Whitescope, told Salon in an email. “The software that runs on these devices is horribly insecure and it will be some time before the overall state of security for devices like this improves.”
Hacking can occur with internet-connected devices or wireless radio transmitters like the ones that control the Dallas storm sirens. And both require similar vigilance against malevolent attacks.
Researchers routinely find vulnerabilities in municipal hardware and software, including with traffic lights and smart parking meters. But some of the biggest concerns lie with what’s referred to as the kinetic hacking of municipal water, power and sewage systems, said Vyas Sekar, a faculty member at CyLab, Carnegie Mellon’s Security and Privacy Institute.
