Zombies Infest Montana

Karloff

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Oct 19, 2009
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Zombies Infest Montana


There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission.

Ask yourself this: if, during the broadcast of an otherwise forgettable 'teen love cheats' television show, someone bust in and said that civilian authorities had reported zombie attacks in your state, what would you do?

Because, if you happen to live in Montana, that's pretty much what happened. The message was broadcast over a television network's Emergency Alert System, and was put out there by hackers. "The message did not come from our station," says the affected network, KRTV [http://www.krtv.com/news/bogus-emergency-alert-message-transmitted/]. "Our engineers our looking into the origin of the alert to make sure a similar occurrence does not happen again."

According to Lt. Shane Sorensen [http://www.greatfallstribune.com/interactive/article/20130211/NEWS01/302110021/-Dead-bodies-emergency-alert-hoax] of the Great Falls, Montana PD, at least four people took the report seriously enough to call the authorities. "And then I thought, 'Wait. What if?," Sorensen chuckled. "We can report in the city, there have been no sightings of dead bodies rising from the ground."

At least, the appropriate authorities [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbBX6aEzEz8] are on their way to Great Falls right now; and, on that note, be seeing you!

Source: Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/12/zombie-apocalypse-newsflash-montana-tv]


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Thaluikhain

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Jan 16, 2010
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Not cool. You do not hack into emergency alert systems without a damn good reason. Personally thinking zombie warnings are hilarious is not remotely good enough.
 

Zombie_Moogle

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Dec 25, 2008
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Absolutely delightful.
My life just became worth the time spent

Edit:
thaluikhain said:
Not cool. You do not hack into emergency alert systems without a damn good reason. Personally thinking zombie warnings are hilarious is not remotely good enough.
I know you're 100% right, but I can't help but be incredibly amused
 

Adventurer2626

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Jan 21, 2010
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*eyeroll* Maybe it's because I've already seen emergency alert bulletins but there was no alert across the bottom and the announcer sounded nowhere near professional enough. I think someone was looking to instigate an Orwellian hoax but failed pretty hard. Especially since War of the Worlds wasn't even a hoax it was a play that got mistaken for a broadcast. Now if this was an actual program that people flipped to and it got mistaken for a newscast, then that might be interesting. Hacker hoax? Not amused.
 

Furism

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Sep 10, 2009
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thaluikhain said:
Not cool. You do not hack into emergency alert systems without a damn good reason. Personally thinking zombie warnings are hilarious is not remotely good enough.
Usually these guys ("Grey Hats") do this to prove that if they can do it 'harmlessly' some other organisations (or states) can do it to cause lots of harm. It can be argued that calling out people who treat security like a second-rate feature is actually doing a service to the users.
 

Therumancer

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Nov 28, 2007
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My basic thoughts on the subject are that hoaxes like this mean that if something really crazy and nerdly did happen, Zombies, Aliens, Demons, invasions of mole people from the center of the earth, etc... nobody would take them seriously due to all of the people making hoaxs like these.

As someone who has worked security before, I will say that the biggest problem in an emergency is not the danger itself, but stupid people who refuse to act or react unless they actually see a danger themselves. This being anything from a fire, to a chemical leak, to anything else. People are more worried about being embarassed, taken advantage of, or exploited due to hoaxes than the potential dangers involved.

Case in point, you have a fire back of the house in a service/mini-kitchen. While the fire response goes out, security heads out to discretely remove people from nearby gaming areas BEFORE the fire could potentially spread and do some damage. The response from your average person is "we don't want to do anything unless we see it" and it's especially a problem when you consider that information control is important, you don't want people to even know what the emergency is for a number of reasons, including potential overreaction (the flip side of the coin), or even law suits (claiming smoke inhalation even if the fire never got that close to you), and similar things. I've in the past thought we should have been issued truncheons and the authority to beat people unconscious and have them carried out on stretchers if they didn't want to evacuate since it's less potentially dangerous than say being burned alive, or killed by some idiot who mixed Ammonia and Bleach or whatever, and the more time you spend argueing with people the less effectively your going to clear an area... and of course you don't want word of mouth to have people on the other side of a building leaving or overreacting (potentially) when it's a localized problem, and you just want people out of a specific area.

The point of that aside, the bottom line is that we've already trained people to not take alerts seriously, and not to respect the authorities who should know better. Hackers and such do not help the situation. Ideally when you hear an emergency alert, or the guy in the blazer with the security tag says "do this" people should do it immediatly, which is the point of why you train in drills starting with school. Of course arguably those same drills combined with the hackers and such have contributed to people actually becoming stupider and less willing to act. When things don't work there are of course criticisms like "durrr, why didn't you clear people ahead of the fire before it spread" or whatever.

It sounds twisted, but I think you'd actually clear people faster with tasers, truncheons, and stretchers, especially when other people saw the process and learned to take it more seriously (I'll leave it to your imagination how literal I'm being here... ) :)

At any rate, my basic attitude is that if someone DID make an alert like this, people would ignore it, and that in of itself would contribute to something like a Zombie outbreak. Likewise if aliens like the ones from the horrible movie "Skyline" appeared and the authorities announced "aliens are attacking, they have a visually based mind control device, do not look outside!" 90% of the people would immediatly look outside. :)

Of course at the same time, while I'm likely to evacuate if asked by the authorities professionally, having been on the flip side of that coin, if someone did annouce something really incredible I'd admittedly look for confirmation by multiple sources. For example if on TV I got an emergecny broadcast about zombies, I wouldn't start gearing up for the apocolypse until I saw multiple sources, including actual news anchors at least relaying the information (preferably on more than one network).

As far as what I'd do in the case of a zombie apocolypse? Rather than talking about my "mad skills" and how genere savvy and able to survive I am, I'll just say I'm a horribly, increasingly, out of shape nerd today, I've been destroyed by brain damage, live on social security after what amounts to forced retirement, and am at the mercy of the modern medical establishment for medication and such. I'm bitter and generally tend to hate everyone and everything for a reason (grr!) and am honest enough to admit not only that, but that in the case of some awesome nerd-fiction come to life I'd hardly be the guy to thrive in that enviroment. I'd probably do okay until my meds ran out, then well... it would be less okay.
 

Strazdas

Robots will replace your job
May 28, 2011
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You know, zombie is probably the threat i would take the most seriuosly. i think its more likely than WW3 by now. and if russians really did attack they would roll over my country within hours with zero actual resistance. actually i think they woudl be greeted with flowers, thats how much up their ass we are.

Therumancer said:
My basic thoughts on the subject are that hoaxes like this mean that if something really crazy and nerdly did happen, Zombies, Aliens, Demons, invasions of mole people from the center of the earth, etc... nobody would take them seriously due to all of the people making hoaxs like these.
so thats why noone takes my abduction story seriuosly. damn you all hoaxers.
sorry, coulnt resist.

The point of that aside, the bottom line is that we've already trained people to not take alerts seriously, and not to respect the authorities who should know better. Hackers and such do not help the situation. Ideally when you hear an emergency alert, or the guy in the blazer with the security tag says "do this" people should do it immediatly, which is the point of why you train in drills starting with school. Of course arguably those same drills combined with the hackers and such have contributed to people actually becoming stupider and less willing to act. When things don't work there are of course criticisms like "durrr, why didn't you clear people ahead of the fire before it spread" or whatever.
very true. they did the alert tests here recently (technically it shoudl happen annually, practically this is the first time in my short 23 year life i saw this). thing is, when sirens went out i did nothing. not even find out what it was about and heard that it was a test the next day. but what if it was a real thing. made me wonder and i wont ignore it in future. (thing is i dont really have a radio or TV, which is where the announcements come via, so ill have to hack tv via internet jtu to find out).

On that note, we had a complete 0 of drills in school. there were zero cncern about that. in fact there was a prank once whne somone pulled a fire alarm, and the teacher simply went out of the class ti find out whiel we all waited. fun. in fact there was a "bomb threat" prank once, but then whole school was told to go home for a day. but only AFTER the bomb squad arrived.