The emergency call centers are administrative ones where 911 calls are routed after having been received. The attacks are part of an extortion scheme, federal authorities say.
Hundreds of emergency call centers nationwide have been hit with Internet-based phone-blocking attacks, part of a criminal extortion scheme that aims to clog the centers used to dispatch emergency services, according to federal law-enforcement authorities and cyber experts.
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Since January, more than 200 public-safety answering points (PSAPs) ? administrative call centers where 911 calls are routed after having been received ? have been bombarded with ?telephony denial of service? (TDoS) attacks that last several hours, according to the Department of Homeland Security?s Emergency Management and Response ? Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EMR-ISAC).
So far, the 911 lines that directly receive emergency calls have not been hit. Instead, the attacks have prevented incoming and outgoing calls from reaching the PSAP centers, which dispatch emergency services.
?Information received from multiple jurisdictions indicates the possibility of attacks targeting the telephone systems of public sector entities,? according to a confidential alert jointly issued by DHS and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in mid-March. ?Dozens of such attacks have targeted the administrative PSAP lines (not the 911 emergency line). The perpetrators of the attack have launched high volume of calls against the target network, tying up the system from receiving legitimate calls.?
The DHS-FBI alert appeared Monday on the website of cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs. But a March 23 ?InfoGram? from the EMR-ISAC said the attacks had grown, hitting ?over 200 Public Safety Answering Points ... around the country.?
Authorities have not yet identified the type of attack. While it?s theoretically possible to organize an all-human calling campaign against the emergency call centers, these attacks appear likely to be computer-generated via Internet-connected voice services, cybersecurity experts say.
The TDoS attacks are part of an extortion scheme, federal authorities say. It begins with a phone call to a call center from an individual claiming to represent a collections company for payday loans. The caller ?usually has a strong accent of some sort and asks to speak with a current or former employee concerning an outstanding debt,? the March alert said. The person with the accent demands payment of $5,000 from the call center because of default by the employee, who either no longer works at the PSAP or never did, authorities say.
If nobody pays the requested $5,000, the person then launches a TDoS attack. Typically, the PSAPs being targeted are then swamped by a continuous stream of calls that goes on for hours, blocking incoming and outgoing calls.
While the phone attack may stop for several hours, it has also resumed. Government offices and emergency services are ?targeted? because functional phone lines are a necessity, authorities say.
There are more than 6,000 PSAPs nationwide. Attacks that have delayed or blocked emergency help at the affected PSAPs could cause deaths by blocking medical crews from reaching victims, cybersecurity experts say.
The attacks appear to be part of a three-year trend among cybercriminals that specialize in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) extortion attacks over the Internet against business websites. These individuals threaten to block customers from reaching the businesses unless the companies pay.
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