Impact of Targeted Cyber Attacks on Electrical Power Systems

This paper formulates targeted and coordinated attacks on an electrical power system infrastructure as an optimization problem to (a) investigate the impacts of such attacks on the electric power grid and (b) to study the extent of damages to the grid depending on attacker’s resources and level of protection employed in the grid. In this research, we consider the coordinated load redistribution (LR) attack, which is a variant of false data injection attack on electrical power systems. The bi-level formulation is investigated through a problem in which the goal of the hacker is to maximize load curtailment and that of the power system operator is to minimize load curtailment. The resulting nonlinear mixed-integer bilevel programming formulation is converted into an equivalent single-level mixed-integer linear program by solving the inner optimization by KKT optimality conditions. The case studies are conducted based on an IEEE 14-bus system. From the results, it is observed that the hacker could maximize the damages to the power grid, even with limited attack resources, by simultaneously targeting the physical system and deceiving the operator with a false power dispatch. This study can provide meaningful insights on the relation between hacker’s available resources, existing security measures and resulting disruption in the power system. The results can be used to design methods to prevent and mitigate such coordinated attacks to improve the reliability of the electric grid.