Predictions of the Harvest Moon

Apparently they can put a computer virus into your machine from a USB device. In addition, there are people who are creating malware for such state institutions as power plants and oil rigs like Deep Water Horizon. Who knows, maybe terrorists could blow stuff up remotely.

And so I make the low hanging fruit prediction of the Harvest Moon, the September Moon.

1) In Western nations banks, brokerages, nuclear power plants and oil drilling rigs will be attacked sometime between now and the end of the year by cyber extortionists. Yeah, and they might give some song and dance about environmentalism, the glories of Marxism or even an Electronic Jihad by Cyber Muslims. But follow the money. If they demand or take cash, that's all they wanted. The rest is either a smoke screen or an after thought.


I predict there will be 4 targets. The west is the first one. The 4th will be one of the biggest mistakes in history.

2) Communist countries will be hit. This will surprise many. Especially those in the communist countries. But the insular nature of communist regimes can mean they are slow in adopting technology and even slower to realize they too need protection. Sure you can control whether your populace gets to eat or starve to death but the electrons don't necessarily take orders from you. They do what other people tell them to do as well. So North Korea, Venezuela, or even China might be in for the shock of their lives.

The shock may be two fold in some of the more corrupt communist countries.
A) A nuclear power plant or oil rig breach that affects a near by nation and causes an international incident
B) Turns out the President For Life and Beloved leader was socking all that money away in a private bank account. When the bank manager reports to the word "We wuz robbed!" the shocking news that the money was in the "wrong" account is also revealed. So Maximum Leader, not only are you now poor but everyone now knows you are a crook.

3) Nations like Russia might be hit. The problem with relatively new nations is figuring out who is in charge of what. This might mean that no one is in charge of anything so they will surely get hit by hackers. Moreover, the people who actually seem to be in charge in Russia at the moment are strong men at the top and mobsters at the middle. Again, with a lot of power distributed in relatively few hands, anything these few did not think of like say, cyber security of nuclear power plants or oil rigs or banks, slips through cracks and leaves things wide open for a hacker.

4) The biggest and last mistake the cyber hackers who are stealing all that money, power and influence will make is hitting the drug cartels. The hackers were the best in the world at what they did so they were sure they would get away with it. But drug cartels have virtually infinite money and no sense of humor.

Let's start with the least horrible thing that will happen to people who have billions today they didn't have yesterday. (A child, could find such person. Do you really think the drug cartels will have any trouble?)

Your puppy will forced to watch while your kittens are tortured to death. Let's not really detail what happens to the humans except to say that if you were planning to divorce your wife, don't bother.


By the way, if it turns out to be real terrorists doing all this and not just high tech bank robbers, don't forget to look for the second plane. Remember the first was just to get your attention...


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