Thread: Twilight 2020
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Old 12-27-2018, 12:45 AM
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Attacks on consumer electronics in a coordinated fashion could actually be a useful weapon if used correctly. If you could cause a bunch of IoT appliances to turn on full blast (huge power draw) at the same time you cause some key power plants to shut down (or redirect their generation to unloaded circuits) you might be able to selectively black out cities. Couple blackouts with false flag terror attacks and you can multiply the damage and panic and throw a whole metro area into a dangerous panic.

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.
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