Potentially destructive extreme events are characteristic of the thick tail of "L-shaped" probability distributions. They have been reported in different fields such as in oceanography, where rogue waves (RWs) can be observed in relatively calm deep ocean waters, or in optics as large intensity pulses. Recently, we have unveiled the mechanism involved in the occurrence of deterministic optical RWs in a commercial semiconductor laser under cw optical injection and showed that they can be predicted some time in advance. Consistent results are obtained in a semiconductor laser subject to an external optical feedback in the short cavity regime, suggesting a generic mechanism involved in the occurrence of these extreme events. We also demonstrate anticipated synchronization as a plausible method to predict extreme desynchronization events in a system of two electronic oscillators coupled in a master-slave configuration. We use this to efficiently suppress the extreme events by applying a direct corrective reset to the slave oscillator.