Abstract

Cyber security for power systems is becoming a concern for many researchers. However, the impact of cyberattacks on actual power systems is unclear. This paper discusses analytically the significance of cyber security for power systems and evaluates whether cyber-attacks are a real threat, or are just a hypothetical concept. First, this paper categorizes the different types of power system attacks and then systematically reviews the cyber-attack modeling, detection, and mitigation approaches for bulk power systems. This paper also discusses prominent cyber and physical attacks on actual power systems and draws a comparison among them based on economical and societal impacts. Based on the facts uncovered in the paper, when compared to physical attacks, cyber-attacks on power systems have had negligible economic and societal impacts. In fact, there is only one documented case (the Ukrainian cyber-attack by Russia) that successfully caused customer disconnections.