Waves of Chaos: From Rogue Signals to The Supervillain Scenario

The talk opens with an 1810 London prank in which a writer flooded a Westminster street with fake orders and requests. The speaker uses it to argue that society runs on a few fragile assumptions, and he breaks down why the hoax worked: it scales, it can be anonymous, it is cheap, and it targets something that cannot be fully fixed. He then asks whether the same logic can be applied electronically to cause disruption at scale.

He walks through examples that make the threat concrete. These include wireless distress buttons and smoke generators that can be triggered by replaying captured radio traffic, inexpensive software-defined radio kits, spoofed SYN floods that could cut a company off from the cloud services it depends on, and consumer drones that now rely on fiber-optic links or onboard vision. He notes that few European countries offer a 24/7 emergency line for critical infrastructure, that bug bounty rewards are weak, and that public-sector pay lags behind the private sector, leaving defenders thin. Belgium's approach to legal hacking disclosure is presented as one option to consider.

He closes by arguing that exercises such as Cyber Europe and Locked Shields rarely test corner cases like duplicated failover databases or autonomous AI-driven attacks. He calls on the audience to propose scenarios worth testing in labs before a real incident forces the issue.