What If: Donald Hacks the Election Results?

DDoS attacks flood servers with so many fake requests for information that they cannot respond to real ones, often crashing under the barrage. It's unclear who orchestrated the attack.

“It’s a very smart attack. We start to mitigate, they react. It keeps on happening every time. We’re learning though,” said Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer said on a conference call with reporters Friday afternoon.

Troubling to security experts was that the attackers relied on Mirai, an easy-to-use program that allows even unskilled hackers to take over online devices and use them to launch DDoS attacks. The software uses malware from phishing emails to first infect a computer or home network, then spreads to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance.

These devices are in turn used to create a robot network, or botnet, to send the millions of messages that knocks the out victims' computer systems.

Okay, here's a good Halloween story: Donald Joffrey Trump, the Great White Wail, turns out to be not quite as stupid as we think. 

He has set up the "I will  accept the election results...If I win," very deliberately, to get Hillary and all the rest of us declaring emphatically how important it is to accept the voice of the people, the unimpeachable process of collecting results from polling places in 50 different states, a very decentralized system, which is impossible to rig because it is so decentralized.

But think of our system--votes are counted in high schools, town halls, sometimes by hand, sometimes by machine, but then they are funneled to bigger and bigger collection points, and all information flows into a central point in each state, so the Greatest Show on Earth, i.e. the Election Night festivities can proclaim a winner in time for everyone to enjoy it; just like a National Football League game, it all has to end like any other show, in time for the sponsors to run their final ads.

So, in this horror show, as those big rivers flow toward the networks, the Russians hack, not into the tributaries, not into the small polling places, but into the big conduits, so as each state's tallies start to coalesce, the hackers get those results and change them, just like last week's hacks where Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Tumblr and a lot of other big networks were hacked by hacking some New Hampshire company nobody had ever heard of called Dyn, which somehow is involved in routing traffic among these big players.  

This attack was so vast I was unable to use the electronic medical record at my office and every computer in a medical care system which is spread out over Massachusetts and New Hampshire was paralyzed, unable to see patients, write prescriptions, operate any office. 

And Donald Trump was just in New Hampshire days before it happened. 

And what, we were all asking, did Donald Trump care about in New Hampshire, with its three electoral votes?

So, how's this scenario?  On election night, Donald wins not just  Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, the entire South and Far West, but he wins, astonishingly,  New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and California. 

How could this be? How can we believe it?

Now we say, Hillary Clinton says, this cannot be.  

And Trump turns to the camera and says, "You rained abuse on me for daring to question the validity of the election: How can you object? The results are in."

Thank you, Vladimir.