The day that 911 was attacked by botnets

The 911 emergency response system is responsible for answering 240 million calls a year according to a consultancy, and those calls are distributed in 6,500 centers that are managed by local authorities and that hardly have modern technological solutions: many follow Depending on the traditional twisted pair of copper, only some can receive text messages and very few can locate the location of the caller.

Cybersecurity researchers have already warned of the danger of this lack of technological defense in this emergency system, a clear example would be that with 6,000 “zombie” smartphones the service could collapse launching a kind of denial of service attack “in telephone format” what actually happened:

How was the botnet attack on the 911 emergency service

The person responsible was an 18 year old young man who was investigating iOS security and who discovered a method for iPhone users who clicked on a link on Twitter to turn their smartphones into zombies members of a curious botnet: one that kept calling to 911 without control.

According to the researchers, 117,502 clicks were made on that link, and each time an iPhone user did so, their mobile phone became the inadvertent source of an emergency call to 911. After following the trail, the original tweet was found in the that a web page was advertised with the message “LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL”.

That person in charge was Meetkumar Desai who after being arrested argued that he was in a bug bounty program (search for software bugs) of Apple. The Cupertino company denied that statement, but the truth is that the young man actually found a bug in iOS that caused the iPhone to call 911 after clicking on that link, something that would not happen if the Twitter user clicked on the link from Android or from a Windows PC.

See also:
IPStorm – What we know about this botnet
Botnet malware that turns your PC into a zombie
Vicious Panda – Malware that uses the pandemic

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