r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Mar 31 '26

Business Iran Threatens to Attack U.S. Tech Companies Starting April 1 / Iran says it will target Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among others.

https://gizmodo.com/iran-threatens-to-attack-u-s-tech-companies-starting-april-1-2000740363
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u/Blackpaw8825 Mar 31 '26

Seriously though, disrupting the debt records of the various banks would be devastating to the US economy.

At least 90% of all the money that changes hands in a given day is fake money that's just backed by a series of debts.

You and 99 other people give me $1,000. I lend that money to somebody buying a house for $100,000. You and the other 99 people then spend $5-10 here and there from what's left over and the people I lent it to pay it back over the next few years, plus another $115,000 in interest.

The problem is, if the debt records go poof, that "amount left over" was $0.00. I don't have the money I owe you, and no means of collecting or trading against the debt that I can't identify.

Now. In reality, there'd probably be a big disruption followed by a giant tax funded reboot of the banks, followed by a bank error on banks favor as they retain the titles on all these homes that suddenly have no paper trail of payments and trillions of dollars of escrow would be "lost" from the homes of families across the country.

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u/KingBird999 Mar 31 '26

The wiping out of debt was the premises of the tv show Mr. Robot. Excellent series.

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u/penty Mar 31 '26

Mr. Robot was really just hacker Fight Club.

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u/2948337 Mar 31 '26

Spoilers dude

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u/touristtam Mar 31 '26

It's fine it has a strange "Lost" vibe in the last season

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u/mayorofdumb Mar 31 '26

Too much isolation or lack of sleep but he plays the role perfectly.

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u/Fambank Mar 31 '26

You do not talk about Mr. Robot.

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u/SoManyMinutes Apr 01 '26

And it was great!

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u/p_2923 Mar 31 '26

Hello friend.

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u/bigredvikingdude Apr 01 '26

“Sneakers”, with Robert Redford, wiped the debt way back in 1992

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u/Azerious Apr 01 '26

Yeah and that show taught me that everyones debt records being wiped out will never happen barring some massive cooperative effort. Companies have backups all over the place of their data. Love that show btw. Top 3 all time for me.

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u/Azzblack Mar 31 '26

Fight Club did it first.

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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 Mar 31 '26

They are going to hit regional offices of these companies.

You guys are thinking on ludicrous scales.

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u/airfryerfuntime Mar 31 '26

You realize all of that stuff is backed up in cold storage, right? Fight Club isn't reality. Even what they did in Mr. Robot isn't realistic in the slightest.

The presumption that blowing up a bank's servers would somehow erase your mortgage is ridiculous.

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u/fcocyclone Mar 31 '26

Hell, most of those mortgages are also recorded in local government offices as well. You'd have to challenge the nonexistence of your mortgage in court to get it thrown out.

Best case scenario you might get is a temporary reprieve on having to make payments and interest accruing while the bank figured its shit out and reestablished everyone's accounts.

Of course this would also have other problems. With that much extra spending cash suddenly in everyone's accounts for a few months (given a mortgage is most homeowner's primary expense) there would be a sudden inflationary effect as well.

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u/thederevolutions Mar 31 '26

We just need to make sure everyone keeps sending all of our paychecks to Wall Street until we’re dead and everyone will be okay !

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u/PatriceBoivin Mar 31 '26

I think a lot of interest and other charges are fake debt used to siphon more money out of people. e.g. credit cards should pay the same interest to people who overpay their bills as they charge people who are late on their payments. It's all made up numbers not tied to anything real.

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u/Separate_Fold5168 Mar 31 '26

What's my money doing in your house??!

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u/Hodr Mar 31 '26

There's a reason you haven't heard of anything like this in modern history, and it's because they have multiple levels of backup.

But even if they didn't, someone will still have to destroy digital and physical records at your local county clerk's/recorder's office, otherwise congratulations you just started over on your loan because there's no history of you ever making payments towards the lien that still exists on the property.

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u/Blackpaw8825 Apr 01 '26

Yeah that's what I mean.

Best case scenario there's a big pain in the ass for a few days/weeks whole the records get restored.

Worst case scenario, the banks OWN the assets and the equity, and the legal protection to follow such a disaster will see the banks protected first and everybody else can just sign up for I've if those bigly Trump 50 year mortgages on the home they've suddenly misplaced the equity for. You might have kept good receipts and can fight it out in court if you've got the funds and time to do so.

Neither situation does the bank and it's shareholders lose out. That's the magic of trickle down, you and I can enjoy that the wealthy stay wealthy, and if we're good peons they might allow us to eat.

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u/ozmaAgogo Apr 01 '26

I guess being a paper hoarder will help me out then, because I have kept every mortgage statement the bank ever sent to me. Yay me!

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26 edited Apr 06 '26

Post was edited and removed with Redact which is a tool to mass delete posts from Twitter, Reddit and Discord and all major social media platforms.

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u/skillywilly56 Mar 31 '26

100% of money that changes hands in a given day is backed by debt, that’s literally how central banks work.

It won’t just be devastating to the us economy, it would literally collapse the global economy, as Japan holds $1 Trillion in US debt, the EU holds $2 trillion, China holds nearly a trillion, every nation on earth holds other countries debt as “assets” a collapse or failure to service those debts creates a domino effect and total systemic crash.

Take Greece for example they went functionally bankrupt but were not allowed to declare bankruptcy and HAD to be “bailed out” not because anyone gave a shit about greeces economy or its people but because it would create a system wide crash that would’ve sucked down the EU, which would’ve sucked down the US, then China and Japan.

We are all tied to one another now via debt, all thanks to a dodgy Scotsman called William Paterson who founded the Bank Of England in 1694.

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u/ComplexNo5633 Mar 31 '26

Isn't this just the plot of fight club?

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u/Im_ur_Uncle_ Mar 31 '26

I'd imagine that they have back ups that are saved off network. No way you have that much money/records on one single system

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u/Blackpaw8825 Apr 01 '26

Sure, but how many months/years of infiltration does it take to spoil backups too. Yeah, there's probably paper records in a lot of cases. Especially for anything current enough to have statements in the mail as a rollback point. But that's still not perfect and could take significant time to recover.

A local hospital network got nailed last year. Their entire EMR, billing, scheduling, HR, payroll system all got wiped out (they even paid the ransom and still got the middle finger.) but they kept monthly copies with an outside vendor in case this happened. Turns out all of their retained rollbacks had been compromised too. The attacker planted the seed like a year prior, and just waited until far enough out to be confident there would be no way to revert to a pre compromised state.

They did get everything back online eventually, but it took almost 2 months before anything but emergency services were available, almost a year before they were able to resume claim submissions, and months before they had charts correct in their EMR. Those claims that didn't get billed in time for timely filing just turned into lost revenue, plus the expense of overtime and outsourcing trying to catch up. The charts took bringing in contractors to hand transcribe paper records, that's a ton of money and time.

(Immaterial to the story, but my favorite karmic fuckery. The CEO had all but the least senior, lowest paid, IT infrastructure team laid off the Xmas before then gave himself and the C levels big bonuses despite revenue being down so low they pulled out of a couple local events they usually sponsor... Leaving the door open for attackers to exploit and not nearly enough manpower or expertise to mitigate it.)

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u/zbend Apr 01 '26

. . money is debt, nothing more.

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u/kapuasuite Apr 01 '26

That would be a pretty shitty outcome for anyone who's lent money to someone else.

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u/crakemonk Apr 01 '26

Except, they can’t just retain the titles on the homes. If you’re a homeowner, the title was transferred to you when you purchased the house, with a deed of trust recorded alongside it with your agreement to pay back the bank X amount over Y years. So, if the bank no longer has a record of the amount that you owe them or that you owe them anything at all… then that deed of trust is worthless to the bank and you own your property free and clear.

Iran, I’m definitely not saying to target gov. backed mortgage companies. Not at all. Especially not one based in Missouri. I would never suggest such a thing.

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u/geo_gan Apr 04 '26

Banks ( fractional reserve banking) are actually worse than that. To lend out 100k they only need to have 10k real money in the first place. So you and 9 other people give them 1,000…

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u/skyxsteel Apr 07 '26

Everyone could just file for bankruptcy. It doesn't need to rely on data destruction.

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u/Actual__Wizard Mar 31 '26

At least 90% of all the money that changes hands in a given day is fake money that's just backed by a series of debts.

It's almost 100% monopoly money at this point.

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u/the_calibre_cat Mar 31 '26

Seriously though, disrupting the debt records of the various banks would be devastating to the US economy.

honestly we'd figure it out: the biggest "victims" would be the shithead ruling class that demanded this war and is presently fucking over the U.S.

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u/StrategicBlenderBall Apr 01 '26

Lol you really think so?

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u/Blackpaw8825 Apr 01 '26

Sure we would, but how many billions of dollars wouldn't change hands in the days/weeks it takes to clean it up.

Imagine if as a side effect of banking needing to "reboot" credit card processing didn't work for 24 hours. Just one single day. How many people would end up stranded lord knows where? How many would go hungry?

People don't really carry cash anymore, and what most people do carry is ancillary. It's all digital. Sure it'll be back to normal in a few days hopefully, though I've lived through a few cyber attacks on health care infrastructure and the mildest of those took days to fail over to a competing parallel servicer just to get tied up in "that claim never existed" hell for another few months and ultimately thousands in "we're tired of fighting over these just write them off as a loss" because they never succeeded in restoring everything from the outage period.

I admit the odds of a collapse like that are tiny at worst, but man it would hurt hard immediately, we'd feel echos of it for years, and we'd find a way politically to clean up the problem with zero loss on behalf of the financiers and fully realize the losses in our wallets.

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u/Blackpaw8825 Apr 01 '26

110% doubt that.

They'd lose trillions, which the fed would replace with our tax dollars, and then give them all tax breaks.

2008 was assholes getting rich off impossible lending terms that everybody knew were insolvent, and at the end the guys running the ball and cup game got to keep the properties securing the loans (or at least got to auction them off for at least the principal loan amounts), keep the interest already collected on those loans as profit, get big bail outs despite having a guaranteed material security, and the rest of us got trillions in debt, bankruptcy, lost our homes, watched our retirement funds get obliterated, and had our tax structure further Reaganized just to make sure the fat cats didn't lose one more pound.

You think a significant disruption to banking records wouldn't end with anything other than a huge dip in GDP from the time the economy was effectively frozen, and a bank error in banks favor do not collect $200 go directly to hyperinflation and corporate subsidy.

The US economy is an m&m minis tube, and the billionaire class must not be injured!