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The Most Ridiculous Article About Hacking You Will Ever Read

From the “I can’t believe they printed that” archives.

On the 4th of July of 2000, a supermarket print newspaper called the Weekly World News warned citizens of an unfathomable, scary possibility. Forget about denial of service attacks against "the Amazon.com" and "eBAY" [sic], there are much worse things to worry about.

"Sickos can wreak death and destruction from thousands of miles away," an alleged computer expert was quoted as saying, explaining his research that apparently proved that hackers could make your computer explode.

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Spoiler alert: the alleged expert didn't actually exist. And the Weekly World News is actually not newspaper that prints real news, although it turns out that sometimes its headlines turn out to be true.

Either way, that didn't stop The Register, a cybersecurity tabloid, from picking up the story, though hinting they caught that it was only a parody.

The Register had hoped to interview Yabenson for clarification of just how the planes would be made to explode. Perhaps via embedded microprocessors whose molecular structure could be altered remotely, as with the previously described e-mail attachment, we were thinking.

But alas, a Web search for the NCPF yielded only the North Carolina Psychological Foundation, which, as we consider it, might have a few valuable insights into this story after all…

Of course, no, no hacker has made a computer explode (yet!) but fears that hacking will escape the confines of the virtual world have only intensified in recent years, and there's been at least a case in which hackers have been able to use computers to make things blow up.

Other publications continue to fall for the hype machine with headlines such as "Hackers Could Turn Your Printer Into a Flaming Death Bomb" or "This 'Killer USB' can make your Computer explode." The movie Live Free or Die Hard, which came out in 2007, also played on similar fears, pitting an international gang of hackers going fighting Bruce Willis' John McClane with exploding computers.

But as we've learned, hackers can also do much worse than take down an ecommerce site for a while. So yes, this story is ridiculous, but like good satire, it has in it a grain of truth.