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Wake up Dallas! Hacker sets off all 156 emergency sirens near midnight
Hacker sets off emergency alarms, frightening Dallas residents
Now Playing Hacker sets off 156...
Story highlights
- All 156 emergency sirens went off around 11:40 p.m. in what appears to be a hacking incident, city says
- The city's emergency alarm system is expected to be back up and running by Sunday
(CNN)Dallas
residents were jolted out of bed late Friday evening after a hacker
triggered all the city's emergency sirens, setting off a wave of panic
and confusion.
All 156
emergency sirens were activated around 11:40 p.m. in what appeared to be
a hacking incident that "woke up a lot of people," Sana Syed, managing
director of public information for the city of Dallas, said at a news
conference on Saturday.
The Office of Emergency Management was able to turn off all the sirens by 1:20 a.m., said Syed.
"It does appear at this time it was a hack, and it does appear this came from the Dallas area," she said.
As
the sirens blared, frightened residents called emergency services and
took to social media to voice concern and learn what had happened.
Emergency
dispatchers received around 4,400 calls between 11:40 and 3:00 a.m.,
Syed said. The rush of inquiries caused a backlog, forcing some callers
to wait up to six minutes to speak with emergency personnel.
In
response to the deluge of inquiries, the city's FBI office posted a
tweet informing residents there was "no active emergency."
Residents were particularly frightened given the timing of the incident. Earlier the same day, a suspected terrorist killed four people in Sweden. And on Thursday, the US struck an air base in Syria in retaliation for a suspected chemical weapons attack there. Days earlier, North Korea conducted yet another ballistic missile test.
"If
you ever wanted to know how jittery an entire community is about
national security, just search "dallas sirens," one Dallas resident
wrote on Twitter.
Other residents posting on Twitter were noticeably annoyed by the wailing alarms.
"Tornado
sirens going off here in Dallas with no rain in sight ... And it's
11:45 p.m. on a Friday night what the hell?" Dallas Resident Eric
Lavender posted on Twitter.
Rocky
Vaz, director of the Dallas Office of Emergency Management, said
authorities had to turn off the city's entire emergency system to stop
the sirens.
Dallas Mayor Mike
Rawlings has promised a full investigation, tweeting the hack "was an
attack on our emergency notification system. We will work to identify
and prosecute."
The city's emergency alarm system should be back up and running by Sunday, said Vaz.
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