Dataset Information

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.

SUBMITTER: Raman G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7423072 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city's power grid.

Raman Gururaghav G AlShebli Bedoor B Waniek Marcin M Rahwan Talal T Peng Jimmy Chih-Hsien JC

PloS one 20200812 8

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 consum ...[more]

PMID: 32785250

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Project description:Highlights • Event-driven serverless architecture requiring low cost and maintenance effort.• Data processing, storage, visualization and sharing on fault-tolerant cloud services.• Backup grid monitoring and control given access to secure Internet connection.• Cloud-hosted operation logging simplies auditing and responsibility tracking.• Cyber security mechanism that complies with CIP requirements for the power grid. Operating a modern power grid reliably in case of SCADA/EMS failure or amid difficult times like COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging task for grid operators. In [11], a PMU-based emergency generation dispatch scheme has been proposed to help the system operators with the supply and demand balancing; however, its realization highly relies on the control center infrastructure for computing and communication. This work, rather than using the on-premises server and dispatch communication system, proposes and implements a cloud-centric serverless architecture to ensure the operation continuity regardless of local infrastructure’s availability and accessibility. Through its prototype implementation and evaluation at ISO New England, the solution has demonstrated two major advantages. Firstly, the cloud infrastructure is independent and fault-tolerant, providing grid monitoring and control capability even when EMS loses the corresponding functionality or when operators need to work remotely away from the control center. Secondly, the overall design is event-driven using serverless cloud services in response to the SCADA/EMS failure event. Thanks to “serverless”, the burden of the server provisioning and maintenance can be avoided from the user side. The cost of using public cloud services for this solution is extremely low since it is architected and implemented based on the event-driven Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) model. This work also develops a comprehensive cyber security mechanism to comply with critical infrastructure requirements for the power grid, which can serve as an exemplary framework for other grid operators to secure their cloud services.

Dataset Information

How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city's power grid.

Publications

How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city's power grid.

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