Sep 20, 2020 16:00:00

Fake news research results show that an attack that 'drives a city into a power outage and paralyzes its function' is possible

Fake news that misleads people is not only annoying, it can also deliberately distort people's thoughts and political opinions, or cause people to believe in false knowledge and pose a public health crisis. A new study shows that an attack that 'uses fake news to manipulate citizens' behavior to power outages and paralyze important functions' is possible.

How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city's power grid
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0236517

Weaponised Disinformation Could Unleash City-Wide Blackouts, Researchers Warn
https://www.sciencealert.com/weaponised-disinformation-could-unleash-city-wide-blackouts-scientists-warn

When talking about the harm of fake news, the social impact of disinformation misleading people is often the focus. However, a new study led by a research team led by Gururaghav Raman of the National University of Singapore said, 'We use fake news as a weapon to manipulate people's behavior and unknowingly reveal important urban infrastructure. You can attack. '

As an example of an attack on an important facility, the research team cited a cyber attack using malware called '

Stuxnet ' targeting a centrifuge for uranium enrichment at a nuclear fuel facility in Iran in September 2010. I am. In this case, the facility itself was highly secure, but a human operator unintentionally infected the computer with malware, resulting in the inoperability of all of the approximately 8,400 centrifuges. It has been done.

Also, the power outage in Ukraine in December 2015 was caused by a simultaneous cyberattack on multiple power facilities , which began with spear phishing stealing employee credentials. 'We know that humans are one of the weakest links in protecting critical infrastructure, especially the power grid,' the researchers said.

But if you want to attack critical infrastructure, criminals don't necessarily have to target people in sensitive specialty facilities, the researchers say. The research team believed that appropriate techniques could be used to manipulate the behavior of the masses themselves and attack critical infrastructure without attempting to break into the facility using traditional cyberattack techniques. ..

Therefore, the research team analyzed whether it is possible to 'block the power grid using fake news' using Greater London , which is the administrative division of London , as an example. 'The main contribution of this analysis is to assess whether a target can attack a distribution system, focusing on manipulating the behavior of individual consumers, not on hardware or software.' , The research team says.

First, the research team investigated whether a major power outage could occur if the Greater London grid was overloaded. As a result, it was found that if peak demand increases during times of high electricity demand, many households will experience power outages. If the maintenance of the power grid has been neglected for several years, it is possible to power outages in the city with a slight increase in demand.

One of the proposed ways for attackers to actually power outages in the city is to hijack SMS and give some people a big discount on electricity bills from 8 pm to 10 pm. ], And boosts demand during times when electricity demand is already high. ' If the first person to receive this fake news believes in the information that 'electricity will be discounted' to increase power consumption and spread the message to others, the power grid may be overloaded. There is.

An online survey of more than 5,000 people looked at 'how to react to discounted electricity bill messages' and 'whether to forward messages to family and friends.' As a result of research based on various models, it was found that 3.2 to 26.8% of people believe in fake news and may change their behavior.

It's unclear if respondents will behave in the same way in reality, and the grid model used in this analysis was a simpler one than it really is, but the research team said, 'We're tampering with hardware. By focusing on manipulating actions rather than hacking into grid control systems, we have shown that enemies can cause power outages on an urban scale, 'the research team said.