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posted by on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the near-future-due-today dept.

I have decided to submit a story from the hypothetical future, published by New York Magazine 9 months ago, one that I picked while browsing whatever I missed since my last visit on Schneier on security.

If you put your video-game aside, read this article, and pay attention to the left-side notes, you'll discover thingies in the near future history which you may missed when they actually happened — the election campaign was on at that time. Most of the "fictionals" depicted there actually happened; some that I was aware of, some others I wasn't (e.g. water utility hacked).

On December 4, 2017, at a little before nine in the morning, an executive at Goldman Sachs was swiping through the day's market report in the backseat of a hired SUV heading south on the West Side Highway when his car suddenly swerved to the left, throwing him against the window and pinning a sedan and its driver against the concrete median. [...] When the Goldman exec came to, his driver swore that the crash hadn't been his fault: The car had done it.

[...] A third-year resident in the emergency room at Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights walked through the hospital as a television was airing images from the accident on the George Washington Bridge; that meant several crash victims would soon be heading her way. When she got to her computer, she tried logging into the network to check on the patients who were already there, but she was greeted with an error message that read WE'RE NOT LOOKING FOR BITCOIN THIS TIME.

[...] One Police Plaza had just reported that it, too, was locked out of the programs it used to dispatch officers and emergency personnel, which made responding to the traffic accidents around the city that much harder.

[...] After a few phone calls to friends in the private sector, the cybersecurity chief got more nervous. At the beginning of 2017, one friend told him, she had been called to investigate a mysterious occurrence at a water-treatment plant: The valves that controlled the amount of chlorine released into the water had been opening and closing with unexplained irregularity.

[...] In the summer of 2016, the hackers received an anonymous offer of $100 million to perform a cyberattack that would debilitate a major American city. The group's members weren't much interested in death and destruction per se, so they declined their funder's request for a "Cyber 9/11." But to self-identified anarchists with a reflexively nihilistic will to power, the proposition had some appeal. Causing disruption was something that had been on their minds recently, as their conversations veered toward the problems with global capitalism, the rise of technocentrism, bitcoin, and the hubris required to nominate a man like Donald Trump.

Happy reading.

[Ed. Note: Just as a clarification: this is not fact, but a projection of something that could easily come to pass. All the pieces of this hypothetical attack are possible. Scary stuff.]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:55PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:55PM (#476028)

    How does this go?

    First they hacked NY City and I didn't say anything because it didn't bother me, in fact it seemed a little humorous in a macabre sort of way.
    Then they hacked smaller cities and I was still OK, and didn't take any action.
    When they shut off my power in the 'burbs I had a generator.
    But when I couldn't buy any more gas for the generator it was too late, there wasn't anyone left to speak for me...

    Or something like that??

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07 2017, @06:15PM (#476101)

    Yaaa so anarchists don't have the same level of power that a fascist government has...

    So no, not something like that. The best way to prevent nihilistic anarchists is to make the world a better place so that such people don't want to see it burn.