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by truxten 1874 days ago
The Wikipedia article[0], has some interesting speculation about this. Main ideas behind the cause seems to be either some directed energy pulse or potentially a ultrasound weapon. These kind of invisible weapons are utterly terrifying to me and I feel that they'll just become more prevalent in the coming decades.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

4 comments

So this a super hot take, but someone is asking for an ass whooping. This is basically an act of war. I'm going to just leave it at that. This isn't some random hack, kinetic attack demands kinetic response.
And what if the US was the one who created the technology and started using it first?
Who ever made the order to use it on non-soldiers in a non-combat zone should go to jail for life.
Who exactly would you like to go to war with? The martians?
Who ever is intently committing war crimes against diplomats on American soil. did you not read the brain damage part?
Attribution is hard with digital attacks.

In hacker communities, it's considered best practice to avoid making enemies — a good policy.

As mentioned, this is a kinetic attack.

Attribution will still be hard, but the motivation to attribute (correctly) will be much much higher than most cyber attacks.

It seems like some wideband audio and RF sensors would be able to easily detect this. If it's skull penetrating, I doubt you would even have to place them that densely to detect something out of the ordinary, regardless of the directionality of the source.

There's probably a government contract opportunity for a wearable detector here.

The recent National Academies study for the Department of State seemed to not think it is ultrasonic: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Ha...

Some kind of pulsed RF/microwave seemed to be the most likely?

Thank you for sharing this. It’s helpful to see that others have put substantial work into this problem.
How focused would this need to be to target this particular area? Shouldn’t we see people nearby also affected?