Dallas and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Night of Sleep

By Xavier Reinders

Emergency Siren similar to the ones going off in Dallas

Two days ago on Friday the 7th at approximately 11:40pm 156 emergency sirens in and around the Dallas area simultaneously went off and did not shut off until Sunday the 8th at 1:20am. For almost 2 hours Dallas was in a state of panic with thousands of calls flooding 911 and residents in a panic over the meaning of the sirens. What did it mean? It meant the Dallas' Office of Emergency Management needed to update their cybersecurity and that a breach allowed some outside access port to set off a huge portion of their emergency alarms.

So who, besides the newly sleepless residents of Dallas, care about this breach, well we as people pursuing CSE careers do.  It is a demonstration of two things, the prevalence of short-comings in cybersecurity today and the issues these holes can cause when found by the wrong people. It is pretty early in the investigation but the city spokesperson has said this was almost certainly outside access. Despite the general panic caused by the incident it was generally harmless, aside from the lost sleep and has already been labeled one of the best white hat hacks.

Lets take a quick step back and define this new fangled thing know as white hat hacking. White hat hacking is the good guys, they try and break stuff that is supposed to be unbreakable. If they do break it they let the other good guys know and they fix the issues so bad guys can't break it then take advantage of it being broken to do something evil. Black hat hacking would be the opposite in case you were wondering. As an example to allow you to understand what repercussions exactly that this might have. Lets say a black hat hacker who wasn't planning on attending any formal event that night triggered the same sirens. Now their buddies over at Large National Bank Vault can break in, still all the gold and make their getaway without ever seeing a cop car. The phone lines are too busy with thousands of calls about the sirens that the police never hear about the crooks making off with millions.

Luckily for the city of Dallas this hack, as far as we know, was not malicious and had no serious negative reprocusions.