Researchers warn that hackers can DDoS 911 emergency phone service

Since most folks walk around with their mobile phones, and many have done away with their landline phone service at home, a good portion of calls made to 911 come from smartphones. Researchers from Ben Gurion University were the first to study what would happen if a mobile phone botnet were to launch a DDoS attack on 911 services. What they found, basically, is that such a telephony denial of service (TDoS) attack would cripple the 911 emergency system.

In the research paper “9-1-1 DDoS: Threat, Analysis and Mitigation” (pdf), the researchers said that it would take less than 6,000 “bots (or $100K hardware)” for attackers to “block emergency services in an entire state (e.g., North Carolina) for days.”

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