False Data Injection Attacks Induced Sequential Outages in Power Systems

Cyber-attack is recognized as an emerging risk in smart grids. In this paper, we reveal a potential link between data attack and physical consequences and analyzed how the attacker can launch a malicious data attack to trigger sequential outages and thus impose large damages to the grid. In this attack mechanism, the attacker constructs an optimal false data injection attack to intentionally trigger a targeted branch outage sequence that trips multiple branches and then leads to subsequent failures. The studied attack mechanism integrates constructing an optimal data attack and identifying critical lines, and imposes a substantial security impact with a high chance of occurring. Simulations on the IEEE 118-bus system verify that the introduced attack mechanism and highlight the risk of such attacks in today's smart grids.