What would happen to the world?
How would you respond?
Looking for opinions? Moved from General Questions to IMHO.
samclem, moderator
Terrorists.
I’m sure that major financial and credit institutions have backup of their data in offsite locations. You couldn’t erase debt by trying to blow up offices. At most you could cause delays.
This. There are redundant data centers, plus off site off-line data storage. This is some of the most protected databases on the planet.
Exactly. It would be seen as a horrible act of terrorism, but about as effective and smart as trying to blow up the internet.
If it wasn’t clear from the movie, the main character was insane.
I seriously doubt any real fight club would be based on wanting to attack financial institutions. It would be more like street fighting sports league that met in secret.
And it wouldn’t affect me because the first rule would prevent me from knowing about it. And, frankly, if I did, I wouldn’t care. My cousin is joining a local wrestling league, and I don’t care about that, either. It’s his life.
How much data or financial records were lost when the WTC towers came down. ISTM this would be pretty much the same.
I don’t think anyone ‘went back to zero’.
Well, there was at least ONE company where redundant copies of the data were in each tower.
That doesn’t seem like a good idea. I wonder if they knew they were doing that or if they just sent it to an ‘offsite backup’/cloud company and didn’t realize where they were located? Not that they could have expected something like this to happen, but even just a major power outage, earthquake or even a big weather system could have denied them access to their info. It’s my understanding that the MAJOR players (Credit card companies, banks, data storage places) keep their offsite back up thousands of miles away just to prevent these kinds of problems. So, there’s an Earthquake in San Francisco and they can flip over to the servers in St Paul, MN for the time being.
If I recall, there were fight clubs all over the country and they blew up buildings are over the country.
You’d have to know where the back up is to make it work. I really don’t think, say JP Morgan/Chase has a building somewhere in downtown Omaha that says “JPM Chase Backup Servers” on the outside.
My uncle works for large corporation. They have a building that houses backup servers. It’s a nondescript brick building with no signs on the outside, no windows and a few metal doors. To the random person walking by it just looks like an old warehouse (it probably was a warehouse at one point). But with the flip of a switch it can go live and they can run the whole corporation out of that building without missing a beat.
In order to destroy the retirement plans of all their clients, you’d have to take down at least those two buildings and probably some other offsite backup.
On top of that, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone big like JPM/Chase has more then one backup and maybe even an offshore site as well, just to be really secure.
Oh, I understand that it’s not realistic and that the character was simply insane. I was just pointing out that, in the character’s mind at least, this was more damaging than an earthquake or power outage, both of which are more or less localized (actually a power outage wouldn’t destroy most of the data even it it was worldwide and simultaneous).
In the movie, they didn’t even bring up the subject of back ups, but the OP asked about it happening IRL. As everyone else said, it would be considered an act of domestic terrorism, but it’s not like everyone would be ‘reset to zero’. Yes, some of the smaller companies might lose some data. For example, if you came and burned down my business today, I’d lose everything since the last time I did a backup, probably the last week or two. And sure, some of my customers might not pay me for those outstanding invoices. But, if you owed American Express $6502.22 and then someone blew up the Amex building, you’d still owe them that much money the next day. They only way I could see that changing is if they back up, say, once a day and some of the charges didn’t make it over yet.
You’re looking at it with 20-20 hindsight. We’re in a MUCH different place post-9/11
On the other hand, look at how many disaffected office drones are involved in Fight Club. Given the extent to which the club had infiltrated other institutions, such as the police, it’s reasonable (within the context of the film) to think that they’ve got enough people inside these financial institutions to find out where all the data back ups are, and attack them, too.
Not really no. Fight Club’s terrorism was not realistically going to destroy people’s financial records in the 1990s either. Non-descript heavily protected buildings spread throughout innocuous parts of the country have been a core part of backup/disaster recovery type planning since at least the 80s. Banks were one of the first entities to heavily computerize so they are actually more likely than most corporations to have been ahead of the curve. Now, if you have a small community bank with a single building and say, under $10m in total deposits and they hold your mortgage and you blew up their building in the 1990s–there is some non-zero chance maybe they lose a bunch of records forever. But a lot of times they could still find ways to reconstruct it, like most places I’m aware of mortgage information is usually part of the dataset pertaining to properties for tax purposes. One of the local counties around here, you can search for all tax lots by address or owner name and it shows the value the house was sold for, the bank that holds the mortgage, the amount of the assessment, the taxes per year etc.
That’s a really good point, I hadn’t thought of that.
But that’s what I was getting it. I’m quite sure I’d seen documentaries (or at least factoids) pre-9/11 that mentioned backup centers that were located geographically far away to protect them against whatever might happen.
FWIW, I work for a Wall Street firm, and we came up almost without incident after the markets re-opened after 911. We spent, and spend, a lot of time thinking about disaster recovery.
We are talking about serious money if you want to posit a real-life Fight Club ending. And a lot of very smart, very serious people would lose money and their jobs if someone tried to bring that off.
It wouldn’t work. It might be an inconvenience, and it might mean that less-prepared companies take a hit, but it would be like catching a cold rather than an epidemic.
And even if you assume disaffected people inside the financial institutions, if they are disaffected, they aren’t high up enough to be making much money or having power. A few rogue DBAs just can’t do enough damage before they are detected and stopped.
It was a good movie, but it was fiction.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, you would cause a huge nuisance for those companies. I was working down near Wall Street during Hurricane Sandy and my office was badly damaged by falling debris during 9/11. In both cases we couldn’t go to our offices for months. It can be a real disruption. You might have work saved on a local hard drive instead of the network or in some cases people had their laptops locked in their desks. The companies had to facilitate people working from home or in alternative office space for weeks and months.
You may not destroy the company or erase financial records, but blowing up a corporate HQ is a big, expensive pain in the ass.