Cyber Attacks Against the Economic Operation of Power Systems: A Fast Solution

Today's smart power networks are exposed to an increasing number of cyber-attack events due to the highly integration of information techniques. It was revealed that an attacker can significantly increase the operation cost of a power system by launching undetectable false data injection attacks. However, the attack vector is determined by solving a bi-level linear programing (LP) problem, which is intractable for large systems. In this letter, we present a simple approach to determine an effective attack vector that can cause a significant increase in the operation cost. This is achieved by solving one LP. The simulation results on the IEEE testing systems verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and reveal that large-scale power systems are under high risk of cyber-attacks.