Update on Dallas sirens

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 8, 2017

FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT
Sana Syed, Public Information Office

Sana.Syed@dallascityhall.com

214.846.0519

Update on Dallas sirens

At 11:42 p.m. Friday night, all 156 sirens in the City of Dallas were activated. The Office of Emergency Management, OEM, immediately began to go through various protocols to turn the sirens off. By 1:17 a.m., OEM was successful in deactivating the entire outdoor warning siren system. OEM worked with engineers throughout the night to determine what triggered the sirens.

We can state at this time that the City’s siren system was hacked Friday night. For security reasons, we cannot discuss the details of how this was done, but we do believe that the hack came from the Dallas area. We have notified the FCC for assistance in identifying the source of this hack. We are putting in safeguards to ensure this type of hack does not happen again.  

Right now, our priority is to work on reactivating our system. We won’t know the health of our sirens until we reactivate the system.  We ask residents to be patient with us in case the sirens sound again during re-activation and please do not call 911 or 311 for concerns about sirens.

Please monitor the City of Dallas and Dallas OEM on Twitter or Facebook, because we issue a public notice via social media when we’re about to test sirens. Siren testing is only done at noon on the first Wednesday of each month, weather permitting.