Thread: Twilight 2020
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Old 01-01-2019, 04:58 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bash View Post
<snip>
At the same time there's a lot of cyber warfare doomsday scenarios that are too fanciful to actually be effective. Lots of systems work just fine air-gapped from the Internet proper. It's also trivial to simply shut down or throttle traffic from networks or groups of networks. Anymore network operators are well aware of DDoS techniques and patterns as are CDNs and a lot of cloud providers.

The sort of attacks that might have crippled networks and services twenty years ago are just Internet background noise today. Dedicated attacks by APTs still can and will cause damage to systems. Attackers only need to succeed once to be successful after all. However "unplug the router" is a fairly effective defense against a great deal of attacks.
Thanks for the info, those of us outside the industry don't often hear about the newest protective measures.
Which leads me to another aspect of a Twilight: 2020 setting - nuclear power plants.

Newer NPPs use vastly different tech than their predecessors so the risk of a plant going critical and melting down like Three Mile Island or exploding like Chernobyl are very unlikely. I don't know the specifics so I hesitate to say that it could not happen at all, but again, the chance is very low.
So in regards to a T:2020 setting, the scenario of NPPs being left unmanned and melting down etc. etc. is confined to the older plants. Plants with newer reactor technology and containment principles are designed to slow the reactor process or remove the reactor fuel. If it all goes to hell, the reactor shuts down using the same principle as the dead man switch on locomotives. No nuclear devastation, no wrecked infrastructure, no radioactive contamination for miles around and there's the bonus possibility that the plant can be recovered and restarted.

Makes for some extra scenario possibilities.
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