False emergency alerts sent to Jefferson County cable users
Published 12:12 am Friday, February 21, 2020
PORT TOWNSEND — A suspected hacker used the Wave Broadband emergency messaging system to send out false alerts to approximately 3,000 cable customers, Jefferson County officials said.
Numerous people reported to the county Department of Emergency Management (DEM) about 8:30 p.m. Thursday night after they saw an Emergency Alert System notification on their televsion regarding a radiological incident in the state, public information officer Keppier Kepplinger said in a press release.
Three subsequent messages unrelated to the incident followed, Kepplinger said.
The fake messages were only sent to Wave customers, Kepplinger said.
The DEM alert systems of Nixle and AlertSense were not compromised, she added.
The state Emergency Operations Center confirmed the message did not originate it its agency, either, Kepplinger said.
Wave took action to prevent additional non-official emergency alerts from being sent, and it is in the process of developing and implementing protocols that will prevent such a breach in the future, Kepplinger said.
This story originally appeared in the Peninsula Daily News, a sibling paper to the Herald.
