Hackers can easily spoof and hijack communications targeting sirens part of emergency alert systems to trigger false alerts and cause panic among a local population.
Attackers can achieve this by exploiting a newly discovered vulnerability in emergency alert systems manufactured by
ATI Systems.
Such emergency alert systems are deployed at the One World Trade Center, Indian Point Energy Center nuclear power stations, UMass Amherst, and the West Point Military Academy.
SirenJack flaw impacts sirens' radio protocol
The vulnerability, discovered by
Bastille security researcher Balint Seeber and nicknamed SirenJack, resides in the fact that the radio protocol used to control sirens in ATI Systems is not encrypted.
This unencrypted protocol allows a bad actor, which could be an individual, hacktivist, terrorist, or hostile nation-state, to find the radio frequency assigned to an emergency system, craft malicious activation messages, and set off the emergency system.
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