Tech apocalypse: Five doomsday scenarios for IT
Monday, March 15, 2010 9:16Technology drives just about everything we do, and not just at our jobs. From banks to hospitals to the systems that keep the juice flowing to our homes, we are almost entirely dependent on tech. More and more of these systems are interconnected, and many of them are vulnerable. We see it almost every day.
But what if instead of simply a denial-of-service attack against select Websites, the entire Internet suddenly stopped working — or for that matter, Google could not be reached. What if instead of a mere data breach, our financial institutions were attacked by a weapon that could instantly neutralize all electronic transactions? Or if hackers wormed their way into the systems that control the power grid?
[ Think you’re prepared for every IT contingency? Take the InfoWorld worst-case-scenario quiz to find out. | Every bit of your virtual existence is being monitored -- get scared accordingly with our Top 10 reasons to be paranoid. ]
Heck, what if God decided she’d had enough of us and decided to send a solar storm our way?
If you think these things can’t happen, think again. Some already have occurred on a smaller scale. But we thought it might be fun to turn up the volume and see what might happen — how likely a “tech doomsday” scenario might be, how long it would take us to recover, and how we might prevent it from coming to be.
What could possibly go wrong? Try these scenarios for starters.
Tech doomsday scenario No. 1: America goes dark
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