Comment by lifeisstillgood

I am wondering what the numbers are like for this to be realistic.

I am not too sure of the end goal other than general chaos. Let’s say it’s 2 days of an attack, (that’s about how long any co-ordinated response would need at minimum).

So attackers need to sow chaos across the USA. They apply for a million unsecured loans of say 20k each. That’s 20 billion.

I honestly don’t know what the daily personal loan application rate is, but america has about 150M adults, 1% of them applying on the same day will not only raise flags but would basically grind the system to a halt - each loan office would have daily maximums and a massive spike coukd not be handled. And once the massive crowd is noticed and made public then the financial immune system comes into play.

I can imagine taking out the cell network through a sort of SS7 ddos, but I suspect that cell towers might have a dose more vulnerabilities (probably not as basic as all the admin passwords are ComC4astSux but close)

In general Chaos seems to come from attacking the limited services that act as our safety net (ambulance, police, sewage, electricity). We know these are vulnerable in non obvious ways - crowdstrike for example.

Making otherwise fit and healthy citizens have a shitty day is less impactful than we might think - it will be the “blip” day - as I say 48 hours later the Treasury secretary goes on TV and announces all personal loans that day got cancelled or some other fix - finance has a fairly good immune system when it sees the need.

But overall, if we are going to worry about some attacks, let’s look at the ones that attack our freshwater supplies - and that might not mean some terrorist - in the UK our sewage handling has been under attack by Private Equity for decades and SWAT teams are not allowed to shoot people in Belgravia