A method for assessing the impact of cyber attacks manipulating distributed energy resources on stable power system operation

Successful cyber attacks targeting the electric power system can have severe impacts on the security of supply. Quantification of the impact is needed to develop proper countermeasures that enhance power system resilience. The aim of this paper is to present a method to assess the impact of manipulated control signals sent to distributed energy resources (DERs) on stable power system operation. Therefore, manipulation scenarios and assessment criteria are developed. A case study is performed with the CIGRE medium voltage benchmark grid to test and verify the proposed method using a dynamic time-domain simulation environment. The results show that critical scenarios exist, in which the attacker can force the bus voltages out of the voltage band and thus trigger plant protection of other DERs. The criticality of the scenarios is dependent on the DER distribution as well as the operating point and the amount of compromised DER power. The proposed method is able to rate the criticality of these scenarios and can be applied to other grid models to further investigate the impact of cyber attacks on stable power system operation.