8 Wacky Cyberattacks Worse Than Sony Hack
John Denver music on a loop. Adam Sandler inserted in your favorite movies. Forget Sony: These attacks would really drive the nation insane.
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The era of cyber warfare is upon us. Our enemies, having tired of looting ATMs, stealing semiconductor manufacturing know-how, and trying to crash the nation's power grid, will now increasingly target America's most visible, valuable asset: Movie comedies with dubious plots and casting choices. (Adam Sandler, please stay safe.)
Much has been written about the recent Sony case, in which the giant movie studio was hacked-or-maybe-wasn't-hacked by North Korea. Nearly as much has been written about the subsequent hours-long Internet outage in North Korea. The outage may have been a retaliatory strike initiated by a group of brilliant, super-secretive cyber soldiers working out of the Pentagon -- President Obama is a huge Seth Rogen fan -- or the result of a junior member of the Korean People's Army Glorious Geek Squadron tripping again over that Ethernet cord connecting the router in Kim Jong Un's guest bedroom.
As usual with international espionage, decades may pass before we learn the true story of what happened at Sony. Happily for the 24-hour cable news channels, this won't prevent serious, smart people from speculating endlessly about what happened or opining about policy or technical incompetence on the part of the current administration in Washington.
Some have gone even further, taking the Sony incident to editorialize about the precarious state of modern, computer-mediated existence. Summarizing the situation without a trace of hyperbole a few days ago, Patrick Hubbard wrote this in InformationWeek:
"With the Sony hack, the grim reality, teased by hundreds of security failure anecdotes, is laid bare. No one is safe ... Moreover, with the right influence, entire industries or even nations will be vulnerable to unprecedented coercion."
No one is safe indeed.
About all we do know for sure is this: Sony likely won't make back the $44 million (not counting marketing expenses) it flushed away making The Interview. Yet despite its epic creative, IT security, and public relations failures, Sony will probably throw millions more dollars at Seth Rogen and James Franco to make new buddy movies. Again and again and again.
In the following slideshow, we turn our thoughts to possible cyberattacks, ones that would unprecedentedly coerce us. Spoiler alert: It's little things that will bring us, individually and as a nation, to our knees. "That can't be right! I added $15 to this Starbucks card yesterday! No, I don't have a wallet in my gym shorts. That's WHY I have this %$*&@&*% card!"
Yes, some may argue we're being irresponsible for imagining these nefarious attacks, saying they could give ideas to evil-doers. But ask yourself this: Wasn't Sony irresponsible for greenlighting Adam Sandler's Jack and Jill (2011), the first film ever to sweep all 10 categories of the Razzies? Just think about that for a minute.
What wacky possible cyberattacks keep you up at night? Let us know in the comments below.
(Image: The Interview movie poster)
All requests to reach pornography websites redirect the viewer to audio of John Denver's 1974 classic, "Sunshine On My Shoulders." While this will understandably frustrate billions of perverts, Denver's thousands of devoted fans will celebrate because, sadly, his songs don't get much airplay these days.
Fans searching for John Denver's classic, "Sunshine On My Shoulders," are redirected to MarionettePorn.com.
One Monday morning, the value of every Starbucks coffee loyalty card in every nation on Earth mysteriously zeros out. This event, later known as Zero Hour, causes economies to grind to a halt, tens of millions of fist-fights, and hundreds of millions of caffeine-withdrawal headaches. On the other hand, this is great news for Peet's Coffee & Tea.
Owners of activity trackers like Fitbit and Bluetooth-enabled weight scales will be driven slowly insane by an insidious hack that randomly reduces a thousand steps or adds a pound or two to their device's log.
Do you like screening calls from relatives and annoying friends? That'll be a thing of the past when the "Auto Answer" hack hits. Meanwhile, calls from that love interest you've been hoping to hear from will automatically reroute to audio selections from MarionettePorn.com or John Denver's 1974 classic, "Sunshine On my Shoulders" -- depending on which selection will irritate callers more.
iTunes accounts are re-sorted according to the performer's middle name, which also becomes the only searchable field. Want to listen to Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line"? Look for "R" and start browsing.
A new virus affecting 3D printers will cause them to work overtime at night and produce an assortment of 3D models from MarionettePorn.com.
Movies like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Grown Ups could only attack us in 2007 and 2010, respectively. But what if a powerful computer worm from deranged terrorists erased all other entertainment on the planet, leaving us nothing but these two movies? And here's an even more horrible hack, almost too terrible to contemplate: Other movies still exist but now contain random scenes from Sandler's Jack and Jill.
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