Online attacks can create a lot of trouble as people find themselves unable to get to their bank accounts and shopping sites, as well as sites they need to access just to do their jobs. If the cyber attack is serious enough and widespread, a large part of our economy will just stop. String it out long enough and panic would ensue.
With the Pentagon already offering to take over the presidential election process should a crisis situation arise, it’s not too much of a stretch to ask whether a major breakdown of the internet might be staged just to allow such control to be asserted.
A situation such as the recent East Coast internet outage, ostensibly caused by a powerful and sustained cyber attack, could be the ideal cover for a move by the Pentagon or some highly-militarized government entity to take over.
Here are the details on the recent attack on a New Hampshire internet service firm:
Eleven hours after a massive online attack that blocked access to many popular websites, the company under assault has finally restored its service.
Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, was the victim of a massive attack that began at 7:10 a.m. ET Friday morning. The issue kept some users on the East Coast from accessing Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, Tumblr, Reddit, PayPal and other sites.
At 6:17 p.m. ET, Dyn updated its website to say it had resolved the large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) and service had been restored.
That’s just one attack against one firm that provides internet services. Imagine what would happen with an attack that might be staged against numerous such firms over a period of days. Commerce and a whole lot more would just stop. Panic would spread rapidly.
With the concept of “never letting a good crisis go to waste” firmly in the thinking of those in government, could they use a crisis resulting from the shut-down of the internet to grab power? Or could they possibly manufacture such a crisis just to make it possible to seize control? Hopefully, we won’t have to find out.
Source: USA Today
