Skip to main content

7 Years Later, Emergency Alert Systems Still Unpatched, Vulnerable

chicksdaddy writes: The Security Ledger is reporting that more than 50 Emergency Alert System (EAS) devices made by Monroe Electronics (now Digital Alert Systems) are un-patched and accessible from the public Internet, seven years after security researchers alerted the public about security flaws in the devices. More than 50 EAS deployments across the United States still use a shared SSH key, a security vulnerability first discovered and reported by IOActive in 2013, according to a warning posted by the security researcher Shawn Merdinger on January 19, seven years after the initial vulnerability report was issued.

Security Ledger viewed the exposed web interfaces for Monroe/Digital Alerts Systems EAS hardware used by two FM broadcasters in Texas and an exposed EAS belonging to a broadband cable provider in North Carolina. Also publicly accessible: EAS systems for two stations (FM and AM) serving the Island of Hawaii. Residents there received a false EAS alert about an incoming ICBM in 2018. That incident was found to be the result of human error but prompted the FCC to issue new guidance about securing EAS systems. Digital Alert Systems said it is aware of the problem and is contacting the customers whose gear is exposed. However, a search using the Shodan search engine suggests that few have taken steps to remove their EAS systems from the public Internet in the past week. Security Ledger is withholding the names of the broadcasters whose EAS systems were exposed for security reasons. None of the stations contacted for the story was able to provide comment prior to publication.



from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters https://ift.tt/2tPavPS
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus

An anonymous reader shares a report: On January 9, the World Health Organization notified the public of a flu-like outbreak in China: a cluster of pneumonia cases had been reported in Wuhan, possibly from vendors' exposure to live animals at the Huanan Seafood Market. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had gotten the word out a few days earlier, on January 6. But a Canadian health monitoring platform had beaten them both to the punch, sending word of the outbreak to its customers on December 31 . BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan. Speed matters during an outbreak, and tight-lipped Chinese officials do not have a good track record of sharing information about diseases, air pollution, or natural disasters. But public health officials at WHO and the CDC have to rely on these very same health of...

4 Trends that are Transforming the Future of Healthcare

4 Trends that are Transforming the Future of Healthcare Yoav Vilner / AI , Health , ReadWrite From drinking one’s own urine as a cure for broken bones to blood-letting to sending electrical shocks through a person’s body as a cure for mental illness — healthcare has a somewhat jaded past. Fortunately, as technology has improved our ability to study human physiology, medical professionals have become increasingly adept at diagnosing and curing […] from ReadWrite - The Blog of Things https://ift.tt/37qWAxu via IFTTT

New Web Service Can Notify Companies When Their Employees Get Phished

Starting today, companies across the world have a new free web service at their disposal that will automatically send out email notifications if one of their employees gets phished . From a report: The service is named " I Got Phished " and is managed by Abuse.ch, a non-profit organization known for its malware and cyber-crime tracking operations. Just like all other Abuse.ch services, I Got Phished will be free to use. Any company can sign-up via the I Got Phished website. Signing up only takes a few seconds. Subscribing for email notifications is done on a domain name basis, and companies don't have to expose a list of their employee email addresses to a third-party service. Once a company's security staff has subscribed to the service, I Got Phished will check its internal database for email addresses for the company's email domain. This database contains logs from phishing operations, with emails for phished victims. from Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff tha...