We’ve updated the Emergency Alert System Regular Monthly Test Calendar for the upcoming year. Check it out. Broadcast station EAS administrators can forward this link or list to their traffic department for inclusion in next year’s logs.

A security event took websites worldwide by surprise last week, crashing some sites while others took their sites down to prevent a breach. PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is the dominant means of connecting a website to stored data. A template webpage can be filled with stored data to fill in the important text and images that make up a website, like that you are reading now,, whether for news, corporate information, or commerce.

As I’ve heard it told, AI explored vulnerabilities in PHP code and found a whopper. The news about this got out before patches could be written and distributed. So, as you might imagine, bad actors were out there trying to exploit the big vulnerability.

I first noticed something might be wrong when I went to check-in for an October 20 flight on an airline and was told our reservations couldn’t be found. I checked again overnight and all was well. A day later, our EAS email distributor worked, but our previous bulletins were missing from the page listings.

Then I received an email on October 25 in the middle of the night from our web host Dreamhost saying to immediately change all of our passwords for email and web services.

Later the same day, our SBE36.ORG WordPress website, and apparently any hosted by Dreamhost, went offline. Whether this occurred prophylactically or as a failure is not clear from the site status page. Everything was operational within 24 hours once I could access the temporarily missing SFTP site and change the configuration file to reflect the new password.

There are two takes on this. One is that AI will continue to find security issues that may give criminals openings with results ranging from close calls to international disasters. The other is that AI will help us as a tool to find and harden security to prevent such disasters. And both can be true at the same time.

The Federal Communications Commission’s rules regarding Emergency Alert System security take effect on September 29, 2026. They’ve posted this list of questions and answers intended to help you comply.

The FCC released a Public Notice announcing a National EAS Test date of November 17, 2026, as well as deadlines for stations to file Forms One, Two and Three relating to that test. 

Here are the highlights:

• All EAS Participants must submit their annual ETRS Form One for calendar year 2026 no later than October 30, 2026.
• All EAS Participants must file ETRS Form Two within 48 hours of the nationwide test. The deadline for Form Two filings is 2:20 pm ET on November 19, 2026, or, if the test is conducted on the alternative date, 2:20 pm ET on December 5, 2026.
• All EAS Participants must file ETRS Form Three to provide detailed post-test data within 45 days following the nationwide test, which will be on or before January 4, 2027, or, if the test is conducted on the alternative date, on or before January 18, 2027.