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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: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday March 07 2017, @05:21PM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday March 07 2017, @05:21PM (#476076)

    I've been saying for a while that I'm waiting for someone to shutdown every single OnStar-equipped car, causing giant mayhem for a few days and sending GM into insta-bankruptcy.

    I have to give kudos to the GM security team, because that's a giant obvious target, and somehow it still hasn't happened.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @06:58AM (#476360)

    My main concern is that , ahem, "interested parties" , are stockpiling means of disrupting operations in the event of a political disagreement with the USA that results in armed response.

    I believe these "interested parties" are highly dependent on people being ignorant of how their stuff works and will nag any Congressman that will listen to them about the importance of keeping everyone ignorant, so when all hell breaks loose, few will have the knowledge of whats going on, and those few will NOT be in the USA.

    It would have been impossible during World War II to have enemy agents come in and destroy every radio transmitter on the planet. At that time, we had so many radio amateurs that know how to build a radio transmitter that stations would be coming back on the air faster than anyone could knock them out. Now, if all of our routers one day started deliberately misrouting everything right after some nation declared war on America... imagine what that would do to our ability to "support the troops".

    Right when we need the technology, it will fail, obedient to their masters on the other side of the planet who know the instruction strings needed to awake sleeper-cell technologies, which have laid dormant for decades in routers, cellphones, computers, automobiles, even TV's.

    You would not want them to fail downright... rather fail in such a manner as to goad you into wasting as much time as possible trying to troubleshoot them. Work a little bit then malfunction again. Force the wastage as much time as possible. While we are over here masturbating with our technology, our "enemy" uses physical means of disabling the order-givers.

    We will again discover Ignorance is NOT bliss.

    Imagine all the authority figures we have today, barking orders into inoperative machines. The scope of their authority will be limited by how loud they can yell.

    This is a scenario that plays around in me a lot. Maybe I am just paranoid. I used to work in this kind of stuff, but it was kinda hard to get higher-ups to see how possible this kind of thing is. I guess its kinda like trying to discuss with some authority figure that his fortress is built of wood, and the enemy has gasoline and matches. The authority figure hasn't seen what fire can do.... yet.