A Framework for Cyber-Topology Attacks: Line-Switching and New Attack Scenarios

Cyber security of modern power systems has drawn increasing attention in recent years. This paper proposes a class of cyber-topology attacks derived from false data injection attacks, with the aim of disturbing the operation of power systems. Three kinds of cyber-topology attack are proposed: 1) line-addition attack; 2) line-removal attack; and 3) line-switching attack. By directly misleading the decision-making process of the independent system operator, the proposed cyber-topology attack consequently affects the economic operation and security of the system. We establish optimal attack models for different cyber-topology attack scenarios, and use a recently proposed metaheuristic optimization algorithm the natural aggregation algorithm to solve the resulting attack models. Experiments based on the IEEE 39-node benchmark system show that the proposed class of attacks poses a significant threat to modern power systems.