(WASHINGTON, DC) – A government
exercise meant to test the nation's response to attacks against the nation's
power grid had the most trouble, not from simulated hackers or bomb attacks,
but from its massive stream of simulated newscasts, Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Largest
attack exercise: The utility industry's grid
security watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, issued its first report on the
GridEx IV exercise Friday, showing it to be its largest grid
and infrastructure security event so far.
Adding
realism gets difficult: To add to the realism of
the war games, the two-day event in November had its own simulated newscasts
and social media feeds. It began including traditional and social media in its
last GridEx event in 2015. But the expanded array of social media and tweets in
last year's exercise almost proved to be too much to handle, according to the
report.
Crashing
the system: The problem stemmed from
realistic newscasts competing for space on the same server with social media,
which nearly broke the entire system.
The media platform was used to
"imitate" social media, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs,
in addition to traditional media such as television, newspapers, and radio.
The platform began to buckle
under the pressure of juggling both network news and social media.
What
did the attacks look like? “We
give them an A-Team scenario” that makes it incredibly hard for utilities to
cope with the level of attack, said Bill Lawrence, director of NERC’s
Electricity Information Sharing and Analysis Center, on a Friday call.
Describing
the attacks: The newscasts and tweets
began to flow on day one of the Nov. 15-16 exercise, in which unnamed
"adversaries launched coordinated physical attacks at predetermined sites
using vehicles to deliver explosive packages to damage and disable generation
and transmission facilities." Meanwhile, industry staff were seeing cyber
attacks across the system.
Fog of
war: Lawrence suggested one of
the functions of the social media component is to create the fog of war and
escalate confusion. “We live in a world of social media that our adversaries
can take advantage of” to “scare” and misinform the population, he said.
