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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