Biggest DDoS Attack ever hits US and Europe

[Oberon]

This is true, but when you look at terrorist attacks in the western world they do seem to be very low-tech style affairs, compared to the scenarios that we on forums and the media cook up for them to undertake, scenarios which would paralyse the whole country, rather than bring a city to a standstill.
Drones, for example, are relatively cheap these days, and a single one could feasibly bring down a helicopter. A small swarm could bring down an airliner and the terrifying thing about either is that it would be hard to trace the perpetrator unless a local passer by noticed suspicious people playing with drones underneath a take-off path from an airport.
The real ingenuity in terror groups seems to come back at their source, in places like Afghanistan and Syria where strange hybrid technicals appear with all kinds of weaponry attached to them, to the extent that a BMD gets dressed up to look like an Ostwind. Ok, it's not always the terror groups, it's both sides in the conflict using what they can, but the fact is that it's usually done there and not done here. Instead here we have more basic tools such as suicide belts, guns, bombs and more recently vehicles.
It works, don't get me wrong, it works and it's relatively easy to undertake, which is probably why they do it, the more complicated a plan is, the more likely it is to go wrong. But I remember in the immediate years after 9/11, most of us were absolutely convinced that there would be another attack on the scale of 9/11 within a few years. There's even a predictions page on this forum from around 2002-2003ish in which many people make that prediction. Yet a very different form of attack has emerged which is much smaller in scope but has a fairly powerful psychological punch of its own.
So, are we lucky? Or have we over-estimated the scope of these people? Or is it a bit of both, I think most likely a bit of both, since there no doubt have been those who would like to undertake some of the more bold actions that we theorized could and would take place 'imminently', but our intelligence services have found these people and put them away before they could get started...which means in turn that the strategy has changed from grand plans to small, hard to intercept, easy to plan attacks in populated areas.
It's an interesting, and terrifying, subject to consider, if you take the reasoning behind the attacks away (to avoid becoming bogged down in ideological discourse) and just focus on the style and (pardon the expression) execution of them, then you can sort of understand why they choose them rather than a thousand other ideas that we could list which would rank from being feasible to being more likely to get you put in a super-max.

[Catfish]

There was a book by austrian Marc Elsberg called "Blackout", a not-so-fictional book about a more sophisticated terror attack, just only by influencing remote-controlled electric meters, and what happens after a few hours, days and weeks without electricity. No heating, no water to drink or for flushing, no fuel in excess of what you have in the tank.

Those electric meters are now all the rage in Europe, and i can only warn everyone to use this kind of stuff. Often it is tried to be forced on by the electrical companies, but you can at least try to avoid it and get an old-style meter.
On the other hand all major electricity-generating plants are being controlled by software, which is also being attacked in the book - in Europe, all major plants are interlinked to control production, distribution and efficiency by one old software system.

Infiltration and abuse is entirely possible if you remember "Stuxnet" – ok the latter was created by the "good" guys to wreak havoc on production of fissionable products in "rogue states", but we can expect to be seen as just that by the "bad" guys..

Inspired by the books' contents the german federal office has recently printed some brochures about what to do and how to get over such an event for two weeks, but it sure is not easy, especially for sick people in hospitals, and a lot people will die within two weeks. And after those two weeks...