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Comment by jameskegel | Hacker News Reader

Oh what a world we live in where cyberwarfare could result in death. I would have never thought, as a kid, that life (and death) would end up this "real".

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The hacker Karl Koch [1] thought being responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl [2] back in 1986 causing 2M deaths in the last 30 years. I think we will never know whether he was right or not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker)

[2] (German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB-Hack

I'm confused what the connection is with Chernobyl.

But 2M deaths in the last 30 years is not likely correct - this interesting WHO report on the matter suggests the final toll from the radiation would be more like "up to 4k":

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/

http://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/chernobyl_di...

> The main causes of death in the Chernobyl-affected region are the same as those nationwide — cardiovascular diseases, injuries and poisonings — rather than any radiation-related illnesses

>> The main causes of death in the Chernobyl-affected region...

The Chernobyl-affected region includes big parts of Western Europe. Back then in 1986 my godfather was cleaning trains coming from Russia through Ukraine (but not directly from the Chernobyl region) and was contaminated. He lost his teeth and hair. We lived ca. 800 km away from Chernobyl.

On the other hand thanks the river Dnepr the Chernobyl region is connected to the Ukraine ground water system. The astimation of 2M deaths caused by long time effects of contamination comes from a friend from Kiew. She never drunk tap water.

While not affecting humans directly, an indication of the far reach of Chernobyl is that sheep farmers in parts of Norway still have to medicate the herd.

It's such an extraordinary claim that, without evidence, it's reasonable enough to dismiss. The causes of Chernobyl have been pretty exhaustively thrashed out, and it all seems pretty well explained without any hacking intrusion.

If every claim like this has to be met with a shrug and "I guess we'll never know the truth" then it becomes very hard to ever know anything, because there's always some nutter willing to claim something that's totally at odds with all the available evidence.

The cause of the Chernobyl disaster are extremely well researched and documented; the explosion was caused by a planned test that went terribly wrong. Nothing I have read indicates anything about a hack, and everything can be explained by the actions of the people physically present.

> The hacker Karl Koch [1] thought being responsible for the disaster at Chernobyl [2] back in 1986 causing 2M deaths in the last 30 years.

I don't think that's right, the German wikipedia article says:

> Im April 1986 kam es zur Katastrophe von Tschernobyl. Karl Koch, zu diesem Zeitpunkt schon lange schwer drogenabhängig und in einem oft zweifelhaften geistigen Zustand, sah dies als unmittelbare Folge eines seiner Hacks an, da er kurz vorher in den Rechner eines Atomkraftwerks eingedrungen war.

Unless my understanding of German is flawed, what I'm reading is that it was Koch's drug-fueled paranoia that made him believe he was responsible for the Chernobyl disaster because he had recently hacked into a computer in a nuclear power station. It doesn't say whether this computer even was in Chernobyl, maybe he didn't know exactly where the computer on the other end was, or maybe it was more paranoia. He was, after all, in a pretty bad state near the end of his "career".

It's such a fascinating and sad story, this guy. I've watched the film "23 nichts ist wie es scheint" (initially because of the RAW/Discordia/Illuminatus Trilogy references) a long time ago, but I don't remember anything about Chernobyl in that film (but it was a long time ago).

There was another film, a US movie IIRC, that tells his story from the side of an FBI or CIA (or some agency) agent chasing him. I forget the title, anyone know?

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