While the occasional stories about fake “zombie alerts” hitting highway signs and the like can be good for a quick chuckle, there's a darker side to these faked alerts. Such fakes can distract users from actual emergency conditions, or potentially make it impossible for users to find out about actual emergency conditions that are taking place currently. As such, the FCC (News - Alert)—along with state and local regulators—is looking into ways to better protect the emergency alerting infrastructure from outside incursion.

The push to provide better security comes from incidents back in 2013, when several states—including California, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico and Utah—saw occurrences of what was called a “zombie alert,” when hackers gained entry to Emergency Alert System (EAS) stations and offered up an alert that the “bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” which is at least somewhat close to the original dialogue from George Romero's original “Night of the Living Dead” series. Reports suggest that some stations were able to block the erroneous warning, but other stations were unable to, sending out a false warning of the walking dead attacking the living.

Retired Rear Admiral David Simpson, now Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau Chief, offered up some explanation as to why better protection for emergency alert systems is so particularly important, saying, “But with brilliant innovation comes a new set of challenges: ensuring that public safety authorities are accessible in times of crisis, creating a safe communications environment that enables us to conduct business without fear that our personal information will be stolen, and ensuring that new IP-based networks are reliable and resilient.

As technology advances create new and unforeseen seams, we need to work together with the states to ensure that accountability across jurisdictions is not diluted.” Simpson further noted that the FCC was working with the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC) to “close the cyber readiness gaps” that were involved in allowing the bogus alert to go forward.

Though there's not much information as yet as to the nature of the measures required to “close the gaps” in question, reports suggest that the measures, if taken across the entire system, will result in a “hardened” system better able to resist such outside incursion. The CSRIC will be asking its participants for updates soon in terms of progress putting said measures into play, according to reports.

Given how many people rely on emergency alert systems to notify said people of urgent issues taking place—from thunderstorms to tornadoes and beyond—making sure that only accurate information gets onto these feeds is of the utmost importance. While most will realize from simply a cursory look that, indeed, the bodies of the dead are not coming to life and attacking the living, this is just an example. Imagine the problems if there were a false tornado warning, and viewers went to shelter.

After no tornado hit the first time, there likely wouldn't be a problem—not every tornado warning ends with one particular house being hit, after all—but enough of these together in sufficiently rapid succession would effectively train users to ignore the emergency alert system. That's not a development anyone wants to see happen, so its use needs to be both kept to a minimum and be absolutely accurate whenever it's put into play. It's important that emergency systems be both accurate and trustworthy, and fake messages about zombies running amok don't help either one of those points.