But it turns out that the hackers did non breach Dallas' emergency services calculator systems to trigger the city's outdoor sirens for tornado warnings too other emergencies, rather they did it solely on radio.
According to a statement issued on Monday, Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax clarified the effort of the concluding Friday's chaos, proverb the "hack" used a radio betoken that spoofed the organisation used to command the siren network centrally.
"I don't desire soul to sympathize how it was done thence that they could effort to create it again," Broadnax said without going much into details. "It was non a organisation software issue; it was a radio issue."First installed inwards 2007, the Dallas outdoor emergency warning organisation powers 156 sirens made past times a companionship called Federal Signal.
The urban nub officials did non supply details on how the Emergency Alert System (EAS) works, but noted that "it's a tonal-type system" that's normally controlled past times tone combinations used past times the EAS broadcast over the National Weather Service's weather condition radio, too past times Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) or Audio Frequency Shift Keying (AFSK) encoded commands from a command pump terminal sent over an emergency radio frequency.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) currently has the 700MHz attain of radio frequency reserved for U.S.A. populace safety.
This suggests that the emergency organisation could hold out compromised past times exterior radio equipment replicating the tonal code required to trigger the alarms — which, inwards other words, is known equally a "radio replay" attack.
It is believed that the hacker who managed to trigger alert concluding Fri somehow managed to gain access to the siren organisation documentation to know the exact tonal commands that trigger an alarm, too thence merely played that command betoken repeatedly.
According to the urban nub officials, the decade-old radio-based organisation was disabled hours later on the breach too went alive over the weekend alongside encryption to protect the linguistic communication of tones equally a mensurate to foreclose such attacks.
The Dallas City Council has besides voted to pay $100,000 more to its emergency siren organisation contractor to increase the security of the city's electrical current system.
