False alarm: Sirens wailing in Halle on Saturday due to "external attack"

On Saturday evening of the past weekend, the sirens in Halle (Saale) apparently went off. It was a false alarm. This is presumably due to an “external attack”.

The City of Halle informed about this in a statement on its website. “After the siren false alarm on Saturday evening, there are now initial findings on the cause,” explain the authors of the message. They assume “with a high probability an external attack on the system.” The sirens were not triggered by the city of Halle, nor by the state of Saxony-Anhalt or the federal government.

“The city of Halle (Saale) has taken the necessary measures to secure the siren system and has filed a police report,” it further states. It has also taken the necessary measures to secure the siren system and filed a police report. “All sirens in the city area are protected from external access and are capable of alarming,” assure the authors.

Halle (Saale) city website also disrupted

The city's website www.halle.de was also apparently temporarily unavailable on Saturday evening. The number of accesses, triggered by the siren false alarm, was unusually high and led to an overload of the servers. The city of Halle can rule out a denial-of-service attack (DDoS, Distributed Denial of Service) with “high probability”. Here too, the city has adjusted its measures “to ensure the functionality of the website even with high access numbers.”

The city of Halle does not provide more detailed information. However, in 2018, security vulnerabilities in the emergency alarm systems of the manufacturer ATI Systems became known, which allowed attackers to trigger false alarms. It is not known which system Halle (Saale) uses, but such old vulnerabilities should hopefully have been fixed. In Dallas, a similar incident occurred in 2017, where cybercriminals triggered the alarm sirens in the middle of the night.

(dmk)