This week, there is a new critical alert that requires the public safety community’s immediate attention.
In this recent post on cybersecurity training, we explained why it is one of the most crucial tactics government agencies for cyberrisk prevention—specifically, we highlighted how phishing messages can infect and ultimately bring down an entire mission-critical communications network. With email being such a widely used form of communication, malicious-threat perpetrators are increasing in quantity and sophistication by the minute, looking to take advantage of email’s prevalence in order to exploit it. Statista reports that more than 55 percent of emails sent are considered spam, and many of them contain phishing exploits.
This year has brought a lot of change, and excitement, to the public safety industry. From the announcement of 911 grant funding for states and tribal nations to advance their efforts to implement next generation 911 (NG911) to an increased, industry-wide focus on cybersecurity and preventing cyberattack, the groundwork has been laid for continued improvement for emergency response in 2020 and beyond.
Today, more public safety agencies are taking a serious look at how they can mitigate the risk of cyberattacks due to the dramatic spike in ransomware attacks on state and local governments. Such attacks often result in hefty ransom demands, with reports of demands as high as $400,000. One of the most well-known ransomware attacks of 2019 impacted 22 municipalities in Texas, with hackers requesting more than two million dollars in ransom payment to unlock the data.
Last year, the 911 Center that serves Harford County, Maryland, was having a hard time recruiting and retaining telecommunicators, a problem that is quite common in emergency communications centers (ECCs) across the country.
During the decade that I covered the public safety communications sector for Urgent Communications magazine, I always looked forward to the national trade shows and conferences, such as the one that the Association of Public-Safety Officials (APCO) will host in Baltimore in a couple of weeks. In fact, I and my colleague Donny Jackson spent most of our time in the educational sessions because we felt that was the best place to learn where the sector was heading. As important, those sessions are where one learns about the sector’s biggest challenges and their potential solutions.
Global Positioning System (GPS)-based time sources are used throughout the public safety sector to synchronize a wide array of systems and equipment, including radio consoles, voice recorders, and computer-aided dispatch, fire alarm and video surveillance systems. Such time sources, known as master clocks, also ensure that every system used by a public safety agency generates an accurate, consistent timestamp for every emergency event that requires a law enforcement, fire/rescue and/or emergency medical services (EMS) response.
An event that will occur in two days—Saturday, April 6—threatens to throw things out of sync, at least to some degree. GPS marks time by transmitting signals that indicate the current week and the number of seconds into that week. That data is then converted by the various systems and equipment into the more recognizable format of year, month, day and time of day.
Because the field that represents the current week is a 10-bit binary number, a total of 1,024 weeks can transpire—roughly 19.7 years—before GPS resets the week value to zero. In the world of GPS, this time period is known as an epoch. The first epoch began on January 6, 1980 and rolled over on August 21, 1999; the second epoch will roll over in two days.
From coast to coast, public safety agencies are implementing Emergency Services Internet Protocol (IP) Networks (ESInets) to provide Next Generation 911 (NG911) services. Such broadband-enabled networks promise to greatly enhance emergency response, as they will enable bandwidth-intensive files, such as streaming video, to be received by NG911-capable public safety answering points (PSAPs) and then shared with first responders in the field, bringing situational awareness to new, lofty levels.
At the same time, ESInets will enable PSAPs to share data with each other seamlessly and in real time, and will enable them to serve as backups to each other in the event that one or more PSAPs in a region are rendered inoperable, inaccessible or uninhabitable due to a disaster.
That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that municipal communications systems, especially 911 systems, are viewed in the black-hat hacker community as a very large notch in the belt, so they increasingly are being targeted. More than 180 cyber attacks on PSAP infrastructure have been recorded in the last two years alone. A huge factor is that IP networks are far more vulnerable to cyber attack than the closed networks provided by telecommunications carriers that carried 911 calls to PSAPs for most of the last half century. (Learn more about this and how 911 network management is changing in our upcoming webinar on 4/26.)
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