By John Siciliano, Washington Examiner
A government exercise meant to test the nation’s response to attacks against the nation’s electricity grid got into the most trouble, not from simulated hackers or bomb attacks, but from its simulated news casts, Facebook, and Twitter feeds.
The utility industry’s grid security watchdog, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, issued its first report on the GridEx IV exercise on Friday, showing it to be one of the largest grid and infrastructure security events of all time.
To add to the realism of the attacks, the two-day event last November had its own simulated newscasts and social media feeds. This is something it began to do in the 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.
The problem stemmed from realistic newscasts competing for space with social media on the same server, 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 like television, newspapers, and radio.
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