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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

(This is my frustrated reaction to this whinger [soylentnews.org].

So I decided to submit) a story from the near future, published the by NYMag 9 moths ago [nymag.com], one that I picked while browsing whatever I missed since my last visit on Schneier on security [schneier.com].

If you let your video-game aside, read this FA and pay attention to the left-side notes, you'll discover thingies in the near history which you may missed when they actually happened - the electoral 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 [theregister.co.uk])

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...
...
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 personnel8, 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.”16 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.
 

Original Submission