Imagine a scenario where 3.2 million internet users suddenly lose access to the web simultaneously. Worse yet, they all live in the same country, meaning the loss is affecting them on both a local and national level. According to The Guardian, this is precisely what happened when a 75-year-old lady known to the public by only her street name, the “spade-hacker,” struck. With just the flick of her wrist, this notorious cutter took out the internet service in all of Armenia, rendering the whole country internet-less for more than five hours.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how the senior managed to pull off this seemingly impossible feat. Had she trained on the dark web perhaps, studying for years under other notorious hackers whose nicknames are equally ominous? Was she some sort of master of code or computer science? It would seem that disabling the internet for an entire country is something most people couldn’t pull off no matter how hard they tried.
The shocking twist, according to BBC, is that she didn’t try. The “spade-hacker” was actually a poor pensioner trying to strike it rich by digging for copper. In fact, she cut off the internet by accident, or at least that’s what the evidence suggests.