This is for real a Live Free and Die Hard moment. Bruce Willis may need to be called in to fix this problem.
The director of the National Security Agency believes hacker collective Anonymous will have the ability to knock out power grids in the next one to two years, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Although he hasn’t publicly mentioned Anonymous, Gen. Keith Alexander has warned in private White House briefings that the group may develop a way to cause limited blackouts.
Intelligence officials say Chinese and Russian hackers have already accessed systems that run the U.S. electric grid, and there are concerns that attacks on the grid could be outsourced to a “stateless” fringe group like Anonymous.
Anonymous has never announced a power outage as one of its goals. Thus far, the group has stuck to targeting corporations and government agencies with DDoS attacks and embarrassing email leaks.
If hackers really wanted to do the world a favor, why not erase Sallie Mae’s records of student loans or Fannie Mae’s records of home foreclosures? That would definitely be a a way to “stick it to the man.”
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The management of Komplicated does not endorse the fomenting of chaos suggested by this author. We don’t disagree with it either, but for legal reasons, we’re saying we don’t endorse it. Right. Likewise, this article was written before the revelation that the head of Lulzsec has been snitching on Anonymous members to the FBI. Wow.]
[Source: thedailywhat]