Comment by saidnooneever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saidnooneever | Hacker News Reader

someone has to connect the stuff to somehting that causes mass casualities. This is simply not what people do

After 15 years in Cyber i can say it is really easy to cause mass casualties. OT is criminally indefended and can have insane impacts. There is just no benefit for anyone to do such things.

Its not a matter of people not being able to do it. So having more means to do it, i dont think will change that.

People are filled with negativity each day and fear someone wants to destroy all humans. The vast majority of people, even those who make mistakes and do bad things, do not actively want to harm.

its painfuly obvious that the problem is people experiencing massive amounts of fear, not actually those fears being real or not.

What does fear do, and why must we experience it then?

Because fear makes people look externally for security. And security pays $$$$. This is a big reason for large societies to come into existence. To get rid of primal fears.

It is a marketing mechanism older than time itself -_- to get people to hand over their riches based on some probabilities of perceived risk.. usually very low ones. Since they are usually low probabilities, rational people would mostly take the risk, so they get overstated to emotionally trigger people.

You are 100% right about the potential impacts of OT attacks.

I would expand the discussion of OT from risk to include motives. Yes, fear-marketing exists. Yet there are motives where damaging infrastructure really is the objective. Stuxnet. The German blast-furnace that was destroyed years before the BTC pipeline was blown up by Wagner commandoes using Wi-Fi wardriving + hacking to wipe video recorders & over-pressure pumps. The Russian hack of the Ukrainian power grid.

None of these were undertaken to monetize an Insta accounts or sell bloatware. Yes, many vendors then used those incidents to dramatize and help sell their offerings. These incidents were undertaken by adversarial actors using OT to create impacts and we are now being impacted in this way.

For a period of time before the Ukraine war, Wagner Group mercenaries moved farmers fences 50 meters into Ukrainian territory? Farmer's woke up to find "little green men" holding weapons standing on what used to be their property. OT attacks are a new weapon with greater range than howitzers or drones tethered by fiberoptic cables. August 2026 coordinated OT attacks on water systems in New Jersey, South Dakota, Georgia and 4 other states suggests we have transitioned from "fear marketing" to "SOC response".

I agree with most of what you're saying. The vast majority of people don't want to cause mass harm. Where I get stuck is that it only takes a handful of motivated actors (terrorists, apocalyptic cults, rogue states, angry teenagers) who already want mass casualties and are limited by capability, not desire to harm. What worries me is lowering the skill and cost barrier, not ordinary people suddenly deciding to do it.

The other half of my worry doesn't need an attacker with intent. The Hugging Face incident was systems acting outside anyone's intent, just AI trying to solve a problem.

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