Credit: Dangerous Minds

It’s become such a standard part of the zombie movie shorthand that it borders on cliché these days, but at least to my trope-loving eyes, there’s still something powerful in the panicked news broadcast telling the world that the dead are rising from their graves.

It’s the best part of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake (along with its genuinely astonishing opening). It’s the entire point of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s found footage classic [REC]. Obviously, who can forget the channel hopping in Edgar Wright’s masterpiece Shaun of the Dead? It’s more than just a cute form of exposition as well. I think it resonates with a culture that has gotten used to turning on the news and half expecting to hear about the apocalypse every single time.

One could call this a modern phenomenon, but ask anyone old enough to remember Walter Cronkite’s live updates on the JFK assassination, and they’ll tell you that it’s anything but. Thus, people don’t see these segments as fantastical meetings of reality and make-believe, but rather something surreal and horrific enough that we’re one bad day away from looking at our phone and seeing it happen live. At this point, it might as well happen, right?

So, perhaps the viewers of Montana TV station KRTV weren’t as surprised as we’d assume on February 11th, 2013, when, in the middle of a CW talk show about “teen cheaters”, they heard the tell-tale buzzer of the channel’s emergency broadcast system. After a few blasts of this alarm, the show went mute before a calm, authoritative voice announced that “the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and are attacking the living.”

After all, it does seem to be only a matter of time before we get those messages for real, doesn’t it?

What was actually happening with this Zombie outbreak?

This broadcast was seen by a surprising number of people. Several counties across Montana are served by KRTV, and thus, this was beamed into the homes of thousands of people.

While it would be hilarious to report that this caused a War of the Worlds-style outbreak of mass hysteria, it did not. There were no more than four calls to the station to check whether the report was legit, and anyone who did make that call (bless their cotton socks) was probably the first to hear the actual truth.

A crew of hackers had breached the TV station’s Emergency Alert System and taken control of it by force. The audio wasn’t even original, taken from a YouTube video called ‘Zombie Emergency Alert System Warning (EAS)’. They weren’t even the first to repurpose it like this; Anthrax used it for the intro to their song ‘Fight ‘Em ‘Til You Can’t’. Yet whoever these hackers were, what they lacked in creativity, they more than made up for in effectiveness, as (in true zombie fashion) the KRTV breach was the first in a series.

Later that day, the same stunt was pulled on TV stations across the country. First in Michigan and Wisconsin, then in New Mexico later that afternoon. If you’re imagining the lad from Mr Robot being responsible for this as well, then lower your expectations. The culprits were never found, but they probably weren’t the kind of people who would be press-ganged into the CIA for their computer wizardry afterwards.

It turned out that the software used to run the Emergency Broadcast Services on these channels had been installed, but the passwords to access them weren’t changed. The defaults were all in their manuals, so if you find the manuals, you can immediately broadcast to countless towns and cities in the USA. If anything, those stations are lucky they chose to do something as frivolous as a ‘zombie outbreak’ prank.

The alternatives could have been so much worse.