"...What I have told you is the direct result of a computer virus that has infected the worldwide financial complex that completely melted the balance sheets so that no one knows who owes what to whom anymore....Details on the new government monetary system will come out shortly."
Grieder's vision makes today's AP report that much more alarming:
"The Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week, according to officials inside and outside the government. Some of the sites were still experiencing problems Tuesday evening. Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, banks and Internet sites also were paralyzed in a suspected cyber attack Tuesday. An initial investigation found that many personal computers were infected with a virus ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said."
The cyber attack is described as an "unusually resilient computer attack that began July 4", just one day before Reuters columnist Matthew Goldstein broke the story regarding a Goldman Sachs former employee arrested by the FBI on federal charges for stealing software codes to Goldman's automated stock and commodities trading business. Aleynikov apparently encrypted and uploaded the software to a website in Germany. Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti said: “The bank [GS] has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways."
Facciponti told a federal judge that Aleynikov’s alleged theft poses a risk to U.S. markets because Aleynikov transferred the code to a computer server in Germany, and others may have had access to it, and Goldman Sachs may be harmed if the software is disseminated. “The copy in Germany is still out there," said Facciponti, "and we at this time do not know who else has access to it. Once it is out there, anybody will be able to use this, and their market share will be adversely affected.”
More from AP:
The South Korean sites included the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, Korea Exchange Bank and top Internet portal Naver. They went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, said Ahn Jeong-eun, a spokeswoman at the Korea Information Security Agency.
Two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem.
Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a "massive outage" and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.
Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.
According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.
"This is very strange. You don't see this," he said. "Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event."
He added that, "The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site's ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack."
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