Having put aside speculations on the intruders’ motivation, I would like to analyze the ways and type of spreading such rumors on the web. Such a research could be of use when forecasting identical events in the future, and also for making recommendations how to resist misinformation in case the action becomes massive.
Web attack chronology
Like it was mentioned above, the starting point was spreading an e-mail consisting the information on bank’s bankruptcy which had been caused by manipulating the bank’s accounts. According to the data of some sources the second channel of appearing the rumor was sending a message on ICQ.
On 11th of June at 8.10 a.m. the informational resource Delo.ua published the news under the title ‘Privatbank has been attacked by web-hooligans’ including commentaries of the press-secretary of PrivatBank Oleg Serga.
Later on that notice was republished on the pages of ‘Ukraina Kryminalnaya’, UkrRudProm and Korrespondent. Also the notice was copied by Ukrbiz.net but with the link to Korrespondent.
Then the news appeared on the sites news.tut.kiev.ua, Tested.TV, ITnews, Uabanker.net. As a source there were different sites mentioned, although all news notices were copies from the web-site Delo.ua.
The second entrance point into the web information space served ‘Novyi Region - Kiev’.
The notice on this web-source was published at 10.08 a.m. It is possible that the journalist of Novyi Region had been inspired by the news from Delo.ua. However, the news author had led her own analysis of events. The material comprises a quotation from the mail sent by intruders, and also commentaries of the Counselor of the President of ‘Privatbank’ Victor Lisitskiy. Furthermore this particular material was taken up by a large number of web sites with web-sources of high attendance among them: Alloy news, Zavtra, KID (zadonbass.org).
And even more, ‘Novyi Region’ sent the notice to subscribers of mailing lists, and published its information in the diary on livejournal.com. Spreading the news was also favored by broadcasting on portals news.meta.ua, news.a.ua, redtram.ru, uaport.net.
The information agencies NOHCHI.VU, HITech.Expert and some independent blogs gave their versions of events.
The scale of web attack
The news was taken up by more than 30 web-sources among which are 5 portals that have more than 10 thousand people visiting daily. Minimally 10 portals have daily attendance 2-10 thousand visitors.
On the sites of online Mass Media a visitor gets only a piece of informational flow. An exact counting the audience covered with particular informational wave is impossible. Nevertheless, it is possible to make an approximate estimation on the basis of public rating data of bigmir.net on the 11th of June, statistic information and own observations over spreading news in Ukrainian web segment.
According to my conclusions, the number of people read the news on the 11th of June is from 3 to 6 thousand people.
Life expectancy of the news on internet is 2 days. At that the percent of looking through the news on the second day is on average 20% of the first day view.
Therefore, an approximate number of people read the news for two days on 11th and 12th of June is 3600-7200 people.
The genius of advertising business David Ogilvy wrote that people reading only headlines are five times more than those who read texts. This information is proved by statistics. Thus, we can suppose the headline was seen by more than 18 thousand web users.
Peculiarities of web attack
One of interesting ways of spreading rumor with the help of web Mass Media is transformation of information from site to site.
In particular case the text of the news was republished without significant changes, but at that the headlines differed. The laws of journalism are compiled in such way that headlines must be ‘attractive’ for readers. The notice on Delo.ua which served as the source for the first wave of spreading the rumor, has a careful descriptive headline ‘Privatbank has been attacked by web-hooligans’. Two and a half hours later the journalists of Korrespondent gave the same material under the headline ‘Privatbank has been either robbed or slandered’. This headline can not be called neutral as it comprises an evident suspicion – what if Privatbank has really been robbed?
The purpose of a headline is to briefly inform of content. That is why it is natural that readers took to make conclusions about content from the headlines only. Thus, the headline similar to ‘Privatbank has been either robbed or slandered’ can give some doubts. And a doubt is often the aim of black PR campaign. The headline on the site Zavtra ‘Privatbank is a bankrupt!’ doesn’t leave space for a different version of the events at all.
The headlines can conventionally be divided into 3 groups: positive, neutral and negative.
An example of the most negative headline is ‘Privatbank is a bankrupt!’, a neutral one is ‘Privatbank has been poked fun at by web-hooligans’, and a positive is ‘Privatbank has not been under bankruptcy danger yet’. In our particular case about 20% of headlines have negative character, less than 10% - positive, the rest are neutral.
At the same time, the content of all articles is either neutral or positive, none of the sites gave a notice of the same sort like an extraordinary mail of the intruders.
In another situation at the presence of significant informational reason Mass Media could have behaved in a different way.
The second aspect of such an attack’s influence is repeating the article on different web sites. A reader doesn’t pay attention to the fact that, actually, we are dealing with insignificant number of sources of the news. When republishing the articles with the headlines changes we can get an impression that all the sites proclaim the same thing. As a famous psychologist N. Kozlov stresses, ‘Masses are never fond of speech logic, but they are impressed by the sensitive images that are caused by certain words and word associations. They are thoughtfully voiced in front of the crowds, and faces immediately take respective expression, the heads are bent. Grammar of conviction is based on stating and repeating’. In our case there are both stating (‘Bank is a bankrupt!’) and repeating the news on web pages of different Mass Media.
Much wider response is drawn by the news taken up not only by web Mass Media, but also by printed editions and television. In the case under consideration the news most likely got only to the newspaper Delo (according to the source link in the article).
Analogs
It is known that similar attacks happened in Ukrainian segment before. The analogous attack on Privatbank for certain took place in March of 2004.
As HITech.Expert points out, ‘Only once in the history of Ukrainian internet an informational web attack caused definite problems to commercial bank ‘Mriya’ controlled by Petro Poroshenko at that moment in 2004. But that attack started with placing the provocative news about bank’s closing down on popular informational resources, which was quickly taken up by TV and Mass Media’. According to information of HITech.Expert the volume of deposit-taking at the bank counted several tens of millions hryvnas.
The impact of information published on the web can lead to more significant consequences for the company.
On the 16th of May on the English-language blog Engadget there was published information that issuing the new products of Apple Company would be delayed for several months. As the blog’s author tells the given information got to web-editorial board in the form of a confidential e-mail initially sent to staff of Apple Company.
One of company’s employees resent the e-mail to reporters of the resource. As we see, the start of this informational attack is similar to the start of attack on Privatbank. But the consequences of publication on Engadget are a lot more serious.
Within 6 minutes after publication of the notice the Apple stock price decreased by 3%. The shareholders started to panic and get rid of the shares, which led to decreasing capitalization of the company for 4 million dollars. The reaction of the company in that situation was rather quick. Apple got in touch with blog’s editorial board and the text of the news was changed. The authors of the notice admitted that they based their material on unchecked data. In the result of removing the source of false information the stock price increased to almost the same level. By the moment of closing the stock the cost of Apple’s share had almost been equal to its cost at the moment of opening the stock.
There are suspicions that spreading dummy e-mail was a planned action which helped the interested party accomplish rather profitable deal at the stock exchange.
This example shows the speed which information is spread at on the web, and what consequences misinformation can lead to for the company.
Summary
The course of development taken informational attack can be divided into two stages:
- Sending spam;
- Copying the news on online Mass Media.
We know little about scale of the first stage, but it is obvious that spreading the news on the sites of informational portals allowed involving quite a large audience.
Copying the news lasted for not more than six hours. Only several reports appeared later. There were just two sources of entering the informational space: notice on the site Delo.ua, and news on ‘Novyi Region’.
To my mind, the action couldn’t lead to significant consequences for the following reasons:
- Informational reason made up by the intruders was improbable;
- From the very beginning sending e-mails looked like spam. The estimation of spammers in society is extremely negative. That is why sending the e-mail which had been considered a spam by journalists and readers couldn’t have been taken seriously.
Informational flow covered from 0.5 to 1% of all Uanet users. The attack can be considered as a small-scale and unprofessional. Privatbank’s actions in that situation were absolutely correct. If you underwent unprofessionally prepared informational attack, the best recommendation would be simply to ignore the ongoing events.
But what to do if there are professionals hiding behind the action?
One of not many attempts to analyze the analogous event was made by Yaryna Kluchkovskaya in Komp&nyon magazine. The author gives recommendations to the companies undergone the informational attack. In particular, it was said about publication the official disclaimer on official web site of the company and in print Mass Media. The other interesting recommendation is PR-campaign following the attack with the purpose of restoring or supporting the company’s image.
Possibility of publishing the official disclaimer should be taken into consideration in each concrete case. There were examples when companies’ excuses drew even a wider response and only did their images harm.
I would add to recommendations that you can steadily influence the course of attack. Informational flow spreads very quickly (in our particular case it took only 6 hours), so for this reason it is very difficult to react in full swing. Nevertheless, the suffered company can appeal to Mass Media with request to change negative headline into neutral one. If to do it within the first day of attack, the number of visitors who are influenced by negative information can be significantly decreased.
It is quite probable that most Mass Media listen not only to the request to change the headline. It is reasonable to supplement the notice with commentary of a responsible person from the company. At that it is not necessary to influence all the sites, as that notice is being copied by them practically without any changes. In our case it was enough to appeal to journalists of three portals: Delo.ua, Korrespondent and ‘Novyi Region’ in order to give the attack another character. With right understanding the situation informational attack can be turned into effective and free of charge PR-action of the company.
As it is seen from the text of the published notices, the journalists willingly address representatives of the companies for their commentaries. Answers to the questions of the journalists can be made in such a way that the company will not only avoid suffering, but will even benefit from the situation. At the same time PR specialists don’t recommend to take great pains giving direct disclaimers, as it would be better to give reasonable and clear commentary and try to change the course of the dialogue, for instance, to tell about the latest achievements of the company.
Quite sufficient argumentation was given by the Counselor of the President of ‘Privatbank’ Victor Lisitskiy who told ‘Novyi Region’ that there was no such amount as 40 billion dollars on ‘Privatbank’ balance, which had been claimed by the intruders. And he also recommended all who have doubts to get acquainted with the corresponding section on the bank’s site. Also Victor Lisitskiy noted, ‘If those people (who sent e-mail. – author’s annotation) had had opportunities to send that to retired and elderly people, to reach somehow their ears, it could have worked out. And the rest of people who use the web either pay no attention or define such ravings’.
And it is really so – the informational attack didn’t work out, but at the same time you shouldn’t belittle the possibilities of ‘sarafan radio’ according to the web version. The example of decreasing the shares of Apple shows that properly planned actions of the intruders can be of great effect.
Yaryna Kluchkovskaya notes, ‘Internet can be a very powerful and effective informational channel which at minimal financial costs is able to generate requested reaction in purpose groups. Even in Ukraine where most part of population are not web users, with the help of the Internet it is possible to manipulate purpose group of middle management link – people of over-average income, the youth of high school and student age, advanced intellectuals and other segments of users. The opinion leaders are also in their most active users of web-resources giving them opportunity to find necessary information’.
Most of the experts come to the conclusion that role of online Mass Media will be increasing in the nearest years. Some analysts say that in 5-6 years web Mass Media will significantly press printed ones, and will compete with TV. It means that impact of informational attacks will only be growing, and it is important to be ready to resist them. Methods will become more sophisticated and efficient, so an unprepared bird can be entangled in skillfully spun web.
