Ethics Final Project Rough Draft

Describe a CaseFor my case I have chosen was the case of a hacker causing mass panic in Dallas by setting off all 156 emergency sirens at once. This attack happened on Friday April 7, 2017 around 11:40 p.m. and lasted until 1:20 am Saturday. This caused the 911 system to become flooded with over 4,400 calls from panicked residents. The hacker set of the sirens by compromising the Dallas city's emergency alert system. The residents were more frightened this time then any other time due to the timing of the attack considering earlier on in the day there was a terrorist attack in Sweden and also on Thursday the US began attacking an air base in Syria. To pull off the weekend’s siren episode, hackers would have needed extensive knowledge of the frequencies and codes used in the Dallas siren system to make them all go off at once.


http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/dallas-tornado-siren-hack.html


http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/08/us/dallas-alarm-hack/


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/04/08/hacker-triggers-all-156-emergency-sirens-dallas/100212412/

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/dallas-siren-hack-wasnt-novel-just-really-loud/
I believe that the hacker was completely wrong for carrying out this attack and should be found and punished to the full extent of the law. This hacker designed this attack to scare everyone while they were all sleeping causing mass hysteria while also causing the 911 call center to become over worked. This may have caused many more problems then were originally intended due to there not being a fully functional 911 call center. The timing of this attack also caused people to become even more scared then they would have been if it was a storm warning because the weather was nice, but the U.S. had begun bombing an airport in Syria along with a terrorist attack that had occurred earlier on in the afternoon. The attackers had no care at all for the citizens of Dallas and their well being. The attack caused the Office of Emergency Management to shut down the city's alarm system until Sunday.

Philosopher
The philosopher I chose is Sir Francis Bacon who quoted the proverb "ipsa scientia potestas est" meaning "knowledge itself is power."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est

I felt that Sir Francis Bacon's proverb has many meanings in relation to the attack I stated above. First, the citizens of Dallas have knowledge of the alert system which was developed to help save lives in case of a natural disaster or any other serious emergency. The hacker took advantage of this knowledge and used it to cause mass hysteria in the same way terrorists do, minus the violence. Lastly, the hacker used his knowledge of penetration to hack into the emergency alert system giving him or her power to do whatever he or she wanted to do with it. The hacker is definitely skilled in various penetration techniques and this could have just been a test of his or her skills to see what could be accomplished and how authorities would react. Therefore, this hacker must be found and prosecuted before he or she commits an attack that will cause damage that is not easily fixed by a technician or engineer.