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

## TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how disinformation campaigns targeting energy consumers can be weaponized to manipulate behavior, potentially causing city-wide blackouts by overloading the power grid.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel model of disinformation propagation through social networks and shows its potential to orchestrate large-scale power outages in urban environments.

## Key findings

- Disinformation can significantly influence consumer energy behavior.
- Social network analysis reveals pathways for disinformation spread.
- Simulations indicate potential for city-scale blackouts due to manipulated consumption patterns.

## Abstract

Social technologies have made it possible to propagate disinformation and manipulate the masses at an unprecedented scale. This is particularly alarming from a security perspective, as humans have proven to be the weakest link 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. We 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 propagates through social networks. Finally, using Greater London as a case study, we show that disinformation can indeed be used to orchestrate an attack wherein unwitting consumers synchronize their energy-usage patterns, resulting in blackouts on a city-scale. 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.