Dummy Data Attacks in Power Systems

The integration of information and network technologies has significantly boosted the efficiency of electric power delivery, but at the same time poses new cyber threats to a power grid. An attacker can compromise meter readings by injecting false data. It was revealed that such false data is able to escape the traditional bad data detection once it obeys the physical laws of the system. However, in this letter we demonstrate that such false data usually can be treated as an outlier, which can be effectively detected by several anomaly detection methods. Unfortunately, we further demonstrate that such false data can be stealthy through hiding among normal data if it is carefully designed. Such false data is defined as dummy data, whose stealthiness is validated by the simulations on the IEEE 24-bus and IEEE 30-bus systems.