Sometimes here we will be posting general strategies for dealing with the enemy. These will often be more of a concept than an application to get the reader into a strategic or tactical frame of mind. These are not "spaghetti against the wall" ideas made up over a cup of coffee. If we post something here and say it is useful, it is because there is a specific application behind that concept.
Case in point: One way to use the power of community.
Normally when you think of community (in this context) you think of forums, discussion groups, sharing pain, stories, etc. Community can be so much more than that.
You see, they have all the money but what we have is people. We have knowledge. And thanks again to other successful warriors for guidance, we know that one of the single-most powerful attacks any real hackers of is known as the "Distributed Denial Of Service" attack.
Disclaimer: A DDOS is an illegal and financially destructive attack. In no way is CWJ advocating such a strategy. However, we can learn from the concept and use it to our advantage.
How it works for hackers:
I am sure most of read about this in the news but the principle is actually simple. A computer capable of being a website can handle many people per second. A basic Denial of Service attack works where the attacker send many fake commands or requests to the website server. Because they are fake, the webserver has to waste time and resources blocking them, sorting them out, etc. While it is doing that, actual real website visitors cannot connect and the website shuts down.
The problem is it is easy to block one single connection, not to mention send the police to a single address. So being the resourceful folk they are, the Distributed Denial of Service attack was developed. In this version the same thing happens but with thousands or millions of separate computers doing the attack at the same time. Impossible to defend against.
How this works for you:
The key thing to take away here is even if one of us learns to stand up for ourselves and demand something as simple as our records, we are an irritant at best (if this is your only attack).
If you take that knowledge as we have and pass it on the the community, a percentage of those will learn to fight as we do and start demanding records, documents or anything they need to defend themselves.
You can do spurious requests if you want but if you have a stated need for a document, certificate etc they can deny you access but really cannot say much more about the request because if it was used against you in a ruling, you want it and will not accept "NO" for an answer. Never give up. Fortitude is essential for this to gain strength.
So in fact this is less than a paper-cut to the enemy but take heart: math is your friend and the most deadly thing you are passing on is knowledge.
What makes this deadly is your compassion and in this case, community. Pass on what you know to others who need help. The math on this is simple. Say on the average each person who learns from you takes 3 weeks to get their warrior face on, learns about combating someone like Cigna and puts things into motion. Further suppose you get 100 people to read the training and 10 people to implement what they have learned. If they too wind up reaching 10 more people and so on, January 1st there is just you. February 15th there are over a 100 people all working the system against them and by tax time they are looking at 10,000+ people all using the system against them to request what is rightfully theirs.
And here boys and girls is where we get to hurt them where they live: the wallet. Now if you really want to blow your mind, the above is just that many people requesting their records. Once you have digested those records we get to level two where the stakes get really high. Basically take the above math and apply it to the same crowd not just demanding records but also policies and any other document used to make their claim go south. If each one only makes 5-10 unique information requests...again, any single person is just doing two very legal things: teaching what you know and asking for what is yours.
Conclusion:
As an attack approach the DDOS has plagued computer systems for more than 10 years and is still effectively taking down targets today. That says that while the particulars of the attack might be stopped, the method is extremely effective and pretty unstoppable.
Do we get much out of it other than their undivided attention? Just a Coke and a smile, like the commercial used to say. That and the knowledge that everyday they get to keep a little less of other peoples money.
At this point cheating the disabled starts to get expensive for them. That is the power of community.
Thus endeth the lesson.
The Tactical Team
CignaWarJournal at Gmail dot com
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