In Dallas, an hour and a half could not turn off 156 sirens of civil defense

Dallas around midnight

On the night of April 7-8, many residents of Texas-Dallas jumped out of bed with a loud sound: shortly before midnight, all 156 city sirens of civil defense in the city simultaneously turned on .

Judging by the video , no panic was observed in the city. The townspeople saw perfectly that the weather was good. There is no wind, the tornado is not visible. But the characteristic impression of the end of the world was created: the night city, and sirens howl from all sides. Surprisingly, the sirens worked for an hour and a half - they were able to turn off only at 1:20 at night.


The location of the civil defense sirens in Dallas. The radius around each siren is 1 mile. The location is chosen so that almost anywhere in the city the distance to the nearest siren does not exceed a mile
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Natural disasters in Texas are commonplace. The sirens were switched on just a few days before, when three tornadoes of the weakest categories EF-0 and EF-1 passed through the area, destroying several houses .

In this case, the weather did not hint at the threat of a strong wind. In the morning, the citizens could only guess at that, which meant a howl of sirens.


Particularly suspicious comrades were seriously worried: “People came to us with questions, maybe we are attacked because of the events that occur across the ocean,” said a city administration spokesman the next day.


Someone was joking about this topic, but many were not joking. Thousands of calls fell on the 911 city rescue service. The peak load was from 0:00 to 0:15 - about 800 calls were received during this period. As a result, the real victims had to wait up to six minutes on the line while the operator picked up the phone.

At first, the authorities announced that the activation of the sirens was caused by a malfunction. After almost an hour, they reported that they were working on solving the problem. This gave rise to a new wave of jokes .


At about 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 fact, disable the emergency warning system. After that, the noise completely stopped, the director of the alert service Rocky Vaz told the press conference the next day. Thus, the sirens worked from 23:42 (April 7) to 1:20 (April 8).

There, at a press conference, a representative of the city administration said that the reason for the activation of the sirens was probably hacking. The authorities exclude remote hacking - they say that someone got physical access to the switch, which combines all 156 city civil defense sirens. Rocky Vaz says that hacking city sirens is a very rare phenomenon, and on such a scale has not yet occurred. A request has now been sent to the Federal Communications Commission with a request to assist in finding the culprit and finding an alternative method of emergency notification in case the civil defense sirens are disabled.

The alert system remained offline all Saturday, while engineers defended the switch from future hacks. She was promised to be commissioned by April 10-11, because thunderstorms are expected again in the Dallas area this week.

This is not the first hacking of the urban infrastructure of Dallas. Probably, a particularly large number of hacker-pranksters live in this twin city of Saratov. For example, on May 31, 2016, someone hacked traffic text boards and brought up various extraneous messages on them, such as “Work is canceled - go back home”, “Burney for the President” and “Donald Trump - werewolf lizard”.



The Texas Department of Transportation said that road signs belonged to a private contractor, and for breaking the board, you need physical access to it. Hacker, whoever they were, may face criminal prosecution. They are not joking with such things, because extraneous inscriptions distract the driver from the road, which means that they increase the risk of a traffic accident.

Interestingly, despite the ominous statements of the police, on June 4, 2016, an unknown joker again began to display extraneous messages on traffic signs. On this day, motorists saw the inscription "Gorilla deserved it" (a few days before the authorities made a difficult decision and shot a gorilla that killed a 3-year-old boy who accidentally got into an aviary - animal rights activists had a scandal about the killing of a gorilla, which included in the list of endangered species on the planet).



If the distracting messages on road signs are really life threatening, the inclusion of warning sirens throughout the city can hardly be qualified as such a heavy accusation. Probably, the authorities here can restrict themselves to the standard - illegal access to computer networks. However, this is only theoretically. The authorities admitted that finding the culprit was like finding a needle in a haystack. The hacker did not leave any marks on the switch.