Article by Brandon Smith from Alt-Market written exclusively for Prepper All-Naturals.

As most people are aware, there was a recent and sweeping internet outage across the US which led to a failure in roughly 8.5 million Microsoft devices.  Disruptions included banks, airline networks, emergency call centers, online retailers and numerous corporate networks.   The outage is estimated to have caused at least $5.4 billion in profit losses and it only lasted about a day.

The alleged cause of the breakdown was Crowdstrike, a cyber-security company that uses large scale data updates to Microsoft Windows networks to counter cyber threats.  Instead, the company uploaded bugged code and caused a cascading outage.  Mac and Linux machines were not affected.

The scale of the shutdown was immense.  25% of Fortune 500 companies were frozen.  Travel essentially stopped.  Business transactions for many companies stopped.  Some banks including Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, TD Bank and Wells Fargo could not function and customers could not access their accounts.

I remember the Y2K scare and, of course, that was all nonsense.  American systems were not digitized to any extent great enough to cause a disaster should there be an internet crash or a software crash.  Today, things are very different.  Nearly every sector of the US economy and many utilities are directly dependent on a functioning internet.

I often hear preppers talk about the imposing threat of an EMP leading to a grid down scenario. However, this kind of danger is highly overblown and exceedingly rare.  Even major solar storms have not caused the kind of electrical breakdown that theorists suggest might happen.  Instead, I would recommend worrying a lot more about cyber threats.  I believe these events will become common in the next few years for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there is the potential for random error.  Then, there’s the potential for a false flag event blamed on random error.

In 2021 in my article ‘Cyber Polygon: Will The Next Globalist War Game Lead To Another Convenient Catastrophe?‘ I warned that if the pandemic crisis failed to achieve the centralization goals of the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions, they may use a cyber crisis instead.  WEF head Klaus Schwab incessantly compared the idea of a “Cyber Pandemic” to the covid pandemic.  He suggested that governments would have to respond to both in a similar fashion (i.e. lockdowns and extensive controls on individual freedoms).

In the past I have written about a very interesting event that was barely covered by the corporate media called the “Fastly Outage.”  I examined the implications of this and more in my article ‘Obama’s Weird New Movie And America’s Extreme Vulnerability To Cyber Attack‘.

In June of 2021 there was an internet outage that led to large swaths of the web going completely dark, including a number of mainstream news sites, Amazon, eBay, Twitch, Reddit. A host of government websites also went down. All this happened when content delivery network (CDN) company Fastly experienced a “bug.” Although Amazon had its website back online within 20 minutes, the brief outage cost the company over $5.5 million in sales.

A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They make up what is known as the “backbone” of the internet.   Only a handful of these company’s support a vast majority of internet activity.  All it would take is for a few to go down, and the internet goes down, taking our economy with it.

The recent Crowdstrike event is perhaps the worst web disruption of all time, and that was just a bug in a software update.  Imagine if someone wanted to deliberately damage internet functions for an extended period of time?  The results would be catastrophic.

With supply chains completely dependent on “just-in-time” freight deliveries and those deliveries dependent on efficient digital communications and payments between retailers and manufacturers, a web-down scenario for more than a few days would cause an immediate loss of consumer goods.  Stores would empty in hours should the public realize that new shipments might not arrive for a long time.

Keep in mind, I’m not even accounting for payment processing between customers and retailers.  If that shuts down, then ALL sales shut down.  Then, whatever food you have left in your pantry or in storage is what you will have to live on until the problem is fixed.  If it is ever fixed…

Network attacks are also difficult to trace, which means anyone can initiate them and anyone can be blamed afterwards.  With the increasing tensions between western and eastern nations the chances of a an attack are high.  And, corrupt government officials could also trigger an internet crisis and blame it on foreign enemies – Either to convince the public to go to war, or to convince the public to accept greater authoritarianism.

I believe a cyber attack is the next most likely global disaster.  We weathered covid and defeated the draconian mandates.  The economy is in the midst of a stagflation crisis but the system is still operating.  But what if the next ploy is a complete shutdown of the web and a fast moving financial collapse?

Figuring out who triggered the breakdown would be nearly impossible.  We could suspect, but tracing digital evidence to a source that doesn’t want to be found is exceedingly difficult.  In the meantime, western officials controlled by globalist interests could lock down internet traffic and eliminate alternative media platforms they don’t like, giving the public access to corporate news sources only.

There are millions of Americans out there ready for a systemic collapse.  According to surveys around 30% of adult Americans now consider themselves preppers.  But that leaves 70% of the population in a daze, unaware and panicking.  Will they care who was behind the attack?  Probably not.  They’ll be far more concerned with simple survival.

What are the most practical solutions to this?  As always we can store necessities to protect our families and friends.  To protect data, I recommend shutting OFF Windows Updates to prevent something like a Crowdstrike error from affecting your devices.  You can also set up a Linux-based device with all your important data storage secured.

You can purchase an exterior hard drive and clone your computer data, then throw it in a closet or a waterproof case.  Then there is the option of building a completely offline device (a computer that has never and will never connect to the internet).

These options protect you and your valuable information, but there’s not much that can be done to prevent a national scale cyber attack and the damage that one could cause.  Organizing for inevitable chaos and violence is all you can do.

With a cyber-event there is the distinct danger of communications disruptions – No cell phones, no email, no social media, nothing.  So, having knowledge in ham radio and radio communications is a must.  I’m a general class ham and I’m still finding there’s more to learn, but a basic knowledge of radios, frequency bands and repeaters will help you to at least listen in on chatter and get important information outside of controlled news networks.

The people who claimed it’s “doom mongering” to examine the threat of cyber attacks have been proven utterly wrong this past month.  We just witnessed one of the worst internet implosions of all time and more are on the way.  Prepare accordingly and remember that technological dependency is a double-edged sword.  Use your tech wisely and don’t let it run your life.

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