Using Disinformation to Cause a Blackout
Interesting paper: “How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city’s power grid“:
Abstract: Social media has made it possible to manipulate the masses via disinformation and fake news at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven to be one of the weakest links when protecting critical infrastructure in general, and the power grid in particular. Here, we consider an attack in which an adversary attempts to manipulate the behavior of energy consumers by sending fake discount notifications encouraging them to shift their consumption into the peak-demand period. Using Greater London as a case study, we show that such disinformation can indeed lead to unwitting consumers synchronizing their energy-usage patterns, and result in blackouts on a city-scale if the grid is heavily loaded. We then conduct surveys to assess the propensity of people to follow-through on such notifications and forward them to their friends. This allows us to model how the disinformation may propagate through social networks, potentially amplifying the attack impact. These findings demonstrate that in an era when disinformation can be weaponized, system vulnerabilities arise not only from the hardware and software of critical infrastructure, but also from the behavior of the consumers.
I’m not sure the attack is practical, but it’s an interesting idea.
Mervyn Bickerdyke • August 18, 2020 10:33 AM
Our local energy company has been trying for years to shift energy usage times by offering discounts. (of course to MINIMUM demand hours…) but people can’t be bothered to put a timer on their washer or dryer (one of the few appliances where it would work) so I doubt that many people would be willing to do it just just because it’s on facebook.