A phone spam “attack” disrupted 9-1-1 dispatch in a four-county area for several hours on Aug. 4, prompting officials to redirect emergencies calls.
“The information we got yesterday (Aug. 4) was a ‘telephony denial of service (TDoS) attack’,” Burnet County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Coordinator Derek Marchio told The Highlander. “It used auto- dialers like your spam robocalls … overwhelming phone systems, not just in Burnet County but in other dispatches across the region.
“Imagine trying to call a phone 10 times a minute. It absolutely inundates that phone system. Just like what happens with the same TDoS cyber attacks when it’s attacking a set of servers with junk requests, junk data to overload the server.”
The outages plagued services in Blanco, Llano and Travis counties as well as the city of Austin and Burnet County.
“It started around noon and everything started clearing up around 8 o’clock,” Marchio said.
In the immediate area, as residents made calls into 9-1-1, dispatchers scrambled to hear callers who were hampered by static or faced “dead air” altogether.
“What was described to us was … dead air or a real staticky connection,” he said. “It was that way for either the call taker or the caller.”
Officials then launched alerts.
“Once they figured out it wasn’t just a local problem or re-boot the system (fix), we had that out in about an hour with us realizing the problem,” he added.
At 1:32 p.m. residents received robocalls and/ or text messages alerting them to the issue.
The text message read: Burnet County OEM: We have had multiple reports of issues with 9-1-1. … The message then prompted residents to migrate to an online link with more details.
The message continued: “If you call 9-1-1 and are unable to hear the call taker, please contact either County Dispatch at 512756-8080 or Marble Falls Communications at 830693-3611. Will follow up with additional information when available.”
Residents were given an option to confirm receipt of the message.
“It was the 9-1-1 trunk lines that were being clogged,” he said. “We were directing people to non-emergency numbers for Marble Falls dispatch and (Burnet County) sheriff’s office dispatch.”
“Our regular phone lines – non-emergency systems – were just fine,” he added.
The reverse 9-1-1 alerts were processed through warncentraltexas. org in which residents sign up in advance.
By Sunday evening, residents began receiving messages which read: “Burnet County OEM: both 9-1-1 call centers in Burnet County have returned to normal operations. Please dial 9-1-1 for any emergencies.”
Marchio added that AT&T, which handles the regional system worked to remedy the issue.
“AT&T was working on trying to get things (spam calls) blocked,” he added.
Marchio added he heard no reports of injuries or failed emergency response as a result of the temporary issue.
“People just started using the other (non-emergency) numbers,” he said. “There is a redundancy built into the system where if our center is busy it backs up to another one, and if that one is busy, it backs up to another.
“Some calls may go through, but it may have to be transferred to a different (line) and have to get transferred over administratively,” ha continued. “You have the ability to do things manually.”
Calls for service in the city of Burnet are currently handled by a city of Marble Falls dispatch communications center. Marble Falls also handles the city of Horseshoe Bay dispatch as well as its own community.
Burnet County Sheriff’s Office handles dispatch for calls coming from the unincorporated area of Burnet County.
“I’ve dealt with outages before. Every outage is different, but how it works – sometimes it’s the software that fails. Sometimes something else that fails,” Marchio said. “But there’s always some sort of backup mechanism to make sure we still provide service to the community.”
