An apetite for curiosity
The inception of the thought
This thought occured to me while I was sitting on my couch still digesting the emotional adventure that had just passed. Not 24 hours prior I finally completed "Outer Wilds" which I had originally started while recovering from an ACL reconstruction earlier this year (2025) in September. This game entered my backlog through the recommendation of Ralph Panebianco - a video game journalist whose opinion I have come to respect greatly. It's been sitting in my backlog for over two years waiting for the right time, and I am so glad I waited.
As Ralph did for me, I will do for others and say that there is very little that can be said about the game without influencing the experience. The only thing that can be said, is that its worth every minute. So its with this sentence that I warn any reader that has taken even the smallest interest to play this game to stop reading and to return after completing the game. For those who have no interest or have travelled the same
The realisation that this global effort exists to gain access to my account that made me think about the thousands of kilometres of network infrastructure and countless machines that are just repeatedly bashing their heads against random accounts with the hope that the credentials they're using would suddenly grant them access (granted at this scale even a 0.5% success rate would still yield them hundreds if not thousands of accounts). That being said, such a brute force approach can't be very efficient and I wonder what the resulting environmental impact must be.
Out of the gate im going to already manage your expectations by saying that answering this question on the climate impact of hackers based on their energy consumption will be rather difficult to tackle, and I am not expecting to get anywhere near a confident answer. Especially when considering that they likely aren't reporting their metrics nor are they purchasing carbon credits to offset their impact for any "genuine" purposes. But this makes this topic all the more interesting to read up on as im sure there's a whole (under)world of learning to be had. In this article I would like to try to get an understanding of:
- How my account came into the lists of all of these hackers?
- What is the scale of all this account hacking business?
- What assumptions can we make on the energy consumption?
- Finally answer the question, how bad for the climate can this all be?
How my account came into the lists of all of these hackers?
Well now we get to go into the exciting and enigmatic topic of the "black market".
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8156786/