Twenty-three minutes

At 12:33pm on 28 April 2025, power went out across Spain and Portugal.

Just twenty-three minutes later, a fake CNN article started spreading, claiming that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen blamed the outage on a foreign cyberattack.

The hoax used two trusted names: CNN had not published the article, and von der Leyen had not made that statement. International media picked up the false claims before anyone could deny them.

If even newsrooms with teams and fact-checkers struggled to spot a fake, families with only a mobile internet connection stood little chance.

In a national crisis, networks can fail, but they almost never go down completely. Some messages still get through, and when one reaches a phone with only five percent battery left, people do not use their last bit of power to check sources. They look for a trusted name, and this hoax gave them two.

 

Ready for the first 72 hours

Disruptions like this, along with rising geopolitical tensions and ongoing cyberattacks on infrastructure, have pushed governments to take action.

The European Union now asks every household to keep enough supplies to last for the first 72 hours of a major crisis, and some nations provide practical guides in every home.

While it is good to prepare people for what to do during a crisis, the current advice misses something important.

Preparedness comes from civil defense, which focuses on supplies, as seen in the toilet-roll panic of 2020. But today’s crises also have a digital side, with fake official messages and “emergency relief” scams appearing when people are most scared.

Civil protection agencies handle supplies, and cyber agencies handle fraud and disinformation. But no one is responsible for the moment when a scared citizen reads an “official” message.

Giving people the upper hand

Scammers rely on catching people off guard. If we remove that surprise ahead of time, people have one less thing to worry about during a crisis.

The first step is for cyber agencies and emergency authorities to add a digital section to every preparedness guide, supported by joint public messages. This section should list the official channels the government will use and clearly state what it will never do, such as asking for payment, passwords, ID numbers, or clicking on a link. When people know this, fake messages become obvious because they ask for something the real authorities have promised never to request.

But collaboration should go further.

National drills often practice restoring power and moving supplies, but they rarely include the fake messages that follow a crisis. Every exercise should include a fake official message, so the government learns to protect its voice as carefully as it protects its power lines.

But for any of this to work, the timing has to be right.

 

Timing is the message

Governments already know how to make a “never” list. For example, FEMA says it will never charge survivors to apply for help and warns about scammers pretending to be the agency. But this advice usually comes after the disaster, when people have already seen the fake messages.

During a crisis, people do not have time to check if a message is real. They can only compare it to what they already know, and if no one told them what to expect, they have nothing to compare it with.

We can build helpful habits now, too.

These habits are simple on purpose, because people remember simple things when they are stressed: pause before forwarding a message, check if it arrived the way the government said it would, and treat anything that causes panic and demands quick action as a warning sign.

If people learn these habits in calm times, they will use them automatically when it matters most.

 

Thinking digitally

Preparedness is more than just having supplies in the cupboard. It is also about what people know when they are scared.

A flashlight helps you see in the dark, but a promise made before a crisis is the only way to prove something is real during a blackout.

If nations want people to handle the first 72 hours, they need to prepare them digitally as well as physically, and protect the one thing no nation can store up: trust.

This article was written by Cywareness, a company specializing in cybersecurity awareness.

As part of its mission, Cywareness continues to monitor emerging trends, analyze real-world attacks, and share practical insights to help organizations stay ahead in today’s evolving threat landscape.