”The highly automated nature of” the emergency alert system “was demonstrated...
"The highly automated nature of” the emergency alert system “was demonstrated yet again” last week when EAS warnings at several TV stations were triggered without authorization and hoax alerts about zombies were broadcast through the common alerting protocol (CAP) format,…
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an industry lawyer said. The “downside” of EAS’s automation has been shown before by unintended alerts such as by ads that included tones that triggered the system’s activation, Scott Flick wrote Thursday on the Pillsbury law firm’s blog (http://bit.ly/VVSNCa). “While the automatic nature of EAS creates the risk of false alerts propagating rapidly, at least the false alerts up until now were somewhat self-inflicted wounds, caused by either the system being erroneously activated by a governmental mistake, or by an EAS Participant accidentally airing an activation code contained in third-party content. Because of the closed nature of the system, false activations necessarily required a mistake from a participant.” That changed as “the backbone of the EAS system was moved not long ago from the closed network model to an Internet-based system,” which triggered the fake alerts this time (CD Feb 14 p8), Flick wrote. “The benefit is that mobile and other devices connected to the Internet will be able to relay alerts to the public automatically. ... The bad news, however, is that by shifting to an Internet backbone, we have opened the public alert system to the same outside forces that plague every other aspect of the Internet.” The “good news” of the “unsettling” hoax is that it uncovered security issues “in the system that can be fixed” by resetting factory-set passwords on CAP equipment, the New Jersey Broadcasters Association wrote members Friday in its weekly newsletter (http://bit.ly/Yw1mi6).