These
sirens are designed to go off a section at a time if a tornado decides
to rip through the city, but at just before midnight on April 7th every
single siren in the city started screaming:
It took city officials an hour and a half to realize they wouldn't be able to fix the problem- because the system had been hacked:
It took city officials an hour and a half to realize they wouldn't be able to fix the problem- because the system had been hacked:
By 1:20 a.m., flummoxed officials had decided the only way to stop the noise was “to unplug the radio systems and the repeater, and pretty much turn the siren system completely off,” as emergency management director Rocky Vaz explained to reporters the next day.
At that same news conference (ironically drowned out at one point by ambulance sirens) city spokeswoman Sana Syed announced that the 95 minutes of howling had not been a glitch after all.
“It does appear at this time it was a hack,” she said. “And we do believe it came from the Dallas area.”
Officials have ruled out a remote hack — telling reporters someone gained physical access to a hub connecting all the sirens, which may not be turned on again until Monday as the city tries to figure out who, how and why.
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