Shenanigans

Last night at 1:45 AM the county paged out an all-stations-call to let us know that 911 was down, and there were large-scale phone service outages for the government statewide. We were directed to man all stations and not rely on dispatch services like usual. Phone lines came back up six hours later; 911 services went back down this afternoon, though they are reportedly working now.

Both my internet service provider and my cell phone's AT&T internet service, two different corporations with completely different infrastructure, were offline simultaneously this afternoon for several hours.

I have not heard any explanation of all this, but it sounds rather like a cyber attack; and there was a significant outage just two weeks ago affecting North Carolina government. Officially this was because crack cyber security agents recognized a danger and took systems offline to fix it; but as the article says, the governor "is being tight-lipped" about the outages, and no word at all has come down about today's.

Today is of course the midterm election day. The National Guard has been called out for just this purpose, although I'm not sure what being 'called out' actually means for a cyber unit. 

In North Carolina, cyber units have trained state entities and officials in most counties, according to Maj. Gen. Marvin Hunt, adjutant general for that state’s Guard. He said the work of his cyber team will “surge during the election to ensure that we have 24-hour coverage throughout this whole process.”

“We’re really that third party that comes in—it’s just assisting them—to give them a different look, so that on election day, we can all have confidence in our election systems,” Hunt said. 

Neely told Defense One that few states are strong enough in the cyber arena, and the need is only growing. 

Security professionals hired by states often face “military-grade adversaries” they aren’t equipped to counter, said Brig. Gen. Gent Welsh, assistant adjutant general and commander of the Washington Air National Guard.

Keep your eyes open, and take special care in case your local 911 service goes down. In the event of an emergency and the service isn't working, go to your local fire department, police station, or emergency medical service facility and report the emergency in person. Go to whichever one is closest. They'll have radios that work even if the phones are out. 

It's not a bad idea to have the local phone number written down somewhere in case the phone lines work but the 911 services don't. People call the station here all the time rather than dialing 911, and for many purposes that works very well. In an emergency 911 is usually a better option because it allows the dispatcher to contact everyone who needs to respond at once, but it is good to have options.