Hackers pwn Baltimore's 911 system?! Quick, someone call 91– doh! The US city of Baltimore suffered a brief outage on part of its 911 service at the weekend – and hackers are being blamed. The Baltimore Sun reports that a cyber-attack on the city's network forced the emergency service's Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) offline. The CAD system is used by 911 operators to direct first responders …
It would seem this attack was very pinpoint targeting just the one server and makes it seem to be, to me at least, an inside job. Yet.... it doesn't make sense unless someone was trying to make a point to the city officials about their systems. If it was to the public that they are vulnerable then that's a different point. If not an insider then was this a test run for something in the future? Too many questions remain unanswered.
The story suggests that the hack was to disrupt 911 calls during the anti-gun protests, which implies to me that there was also going to be an attack on protesters - such aps a mass shooting (and we say Americans don't do irony?) Although that didn't happen.
But on the other hand, the hack may have been pro-protester - I'm reaching here, but imagine a plot to phone 911 and falsely report that the protesters had pulled out guns and were shooting bystanders. Cue police rushing up in cars to shoot dead any black people on the scene.
Or someone may have hacked the wrong computer - say they were led to believe that it's the server that Vladimir Putin uses to order his assassinations.
Then again, who knows, maybe it is.
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NENA Call Answering Standard/Model Recommendation
NENA 56-005.1, June 10, 2006, Revised 8/31/2017
3.3 Standard Answering Protocol – 9-1-1 lines. All 9-1-1 lines at a primary Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) shall be answered beginning with “9-1-1.”
Comment: The correct answering statement is “Nine-One-One”, never “Nine Eleven”. Additional information or questions may be added, as in: “9-1-1, what is the emergency?”, or “9-1-1 what is the address of the emergency?”.
We're told the attack was directed at a specific server, and took down the CAD system
The server was targeted to send a message to management about how a critical piece of equipment doesn't have redundancy.
If this is how lax IT managers are with network security then WannaCry &/or Petya would've been shut down the American government.
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