Sounds like a new, interesting component in a hostile corporate takeover. Drive down valuation, then buy enough (temporary cheaper) stock for your intended puropse.

The central problem as I see it is the unwarranted trust people place on information that appears on the internet. If you approached a stranger in the street, presented them with a printout of a Perl script, and asked how much they trusted it then they'd just stare blankly, and yet they quite happily accept information generated by a script when making financial or political decisions.

Sometimes the information is worth listening to - Twitter bots are running which can give earthquake and tsunami early warning due to the fact that seismic waves travel slower than an uptick in Twitter messages saying "OMG! Earthquake #LA".

It's a question of trust. People have always listened to gossip, and many a fortune has been lost and made based on a rumour about a company. Even in the days of the telegraph people were using the new technology to game the system. The use of the internet to disseminate these rumours is nothing new, it's just far bigger and faster than anything preceding it.

A scarier threat from this is a blended attack that uses various malware, meme manipulation (as you describe), and small scale physical attacks to push various infrastructure past it's breaking point.

A sophisticated attacker could coordinate a number of small scale "events" (think vandalism), and then amplify their effect by using a network of blog and twitter bots to steer and augment Internet traffic about those events.

Then additional small-scale physical events could be coordinated to reinforce the belief that fear and protective measures are justified.

Various malware could then easily be deployed on web sites that discuss these events in order to collect information about individuals that are interested so that their identities and systems can be leveraged to augment the attack.

This kind of mechanism could be used to create large scale panic about food supplies, financial systems, various products or companies, modes of transport, or any other facilities that are used on a large scale.

By itself, this is interesting and troublesome,... but with a small extra push this could lead to nearly catastrophic results. All complex systems exhibit structured criticality to some extent, and all systems also typically have a tipping point where placing any additional stress on the system can cause it to fail catastrophically.

If an attacker studies the system they want to attack in order to identify these weak points and then targets the above mechanism to push that system into a failure mode, then they can cause the system to fail catastrophically.

This is a kind of blended, indirect attack where people are "hacked" and used as a kind of human bot-net to create a large scale denial of service attack on a critical resource or infrastructure. The worst part about this is that once you've managed to manipulate the information stream so that people distrust the resource you are attacking, it's failure under these additional stresses completely legitimizes the fears and distrust that were initially fabricated. At that point, anyone attempting to explain what really happened through social engineering and media manipulation would be discarded as a crank.

Think about it... anybody claiming that some catastrophic failure of important infrastructure was really caused by somebody playing around with misinformation on the Internet is pitching what sounds like a conspiracy theory. No amount of proof, no matter how legitimate the data source, will stand up to the real-life experiences of millions of people who were ultimately victimized by the failure.

If that bends your mind, then think about this:

If the mechanisms are already in place for this kind of thing to be done intentionally, then there is also nothing really stopping it from happening unintentionally.

Wetware is built to find patterns, and it is especially good at finding non-existent patterns in random data when it is under stress. If the right combination of bots and real events occurs then there is a pretty good chance it could trigger a very large event.

All of our systems are increasingly automated. If you think about it. There are no doubt a countless number of as-yet unknown vulnerabilities built into our wired world. All that is required is for an attacker to discover one of these vulnerabilities and exploit it. Or, if there is no such attacker (and I think it likely there is somewhere) then we are still in the position of waiting to discover one of these vulnerabilities in a very unpleasant way.

We may have already seen this kind of unintended event on a very small scale when Orson Welles put War Of The Worlds on the radio...

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