Quantifying the Economic Impacts of Attacks on Competitive Energy Markets

Cyber-attacks on electric energy markets could have tremendous financial impacts in a deregulated power system. Existing indices fail to quantify the financial impacts effectively under intelligently conceived attacks. This paper identifies the conditions under which existing metrics would fail and proposes an improved impact index to better quantify the financial impacts of such attacks. Actual attack simulations on an approximate equivalent of the power system in Arizona are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed metric.