Operational and Economy-Wide Impacts of Compound Cyberattacks and Extreme Weather Events on Electric Power Networks

TL;DR

This paper develops a two-stage framework to analyze the operational and economic impacts of compound cyberattacks combined with extreme weather events on electric power networks, highlighting increased vulnerabilities and broad societal effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-stage modeling approach for assessing combined cyber-physical threats and their economy-wide impacts on power systems during extreme events.

Findings

Compound scenarios increase unserved electric load significantly.

Cyberattacks can cause up to 4% unserved load, rising to 13% in compound scenarios.

Government enterprise activity can decrease by 30% under compound threats.

Abstract

The growing frequencies of extreme weather events and cyberattacks give rise to a novel threat where a malicious cyber actor aims to disrupt stressed components of critical infrastructure systems immediately before, during, or shortly after an extreme weather event. In this paper, we initiate the study of Compound Cyber-Physical Threats and develop a two-stage framework for the analysis of operational disruptions in electric power networks and economy-wide impacts under three scenarios: a Heatwave, a Cyberattack, and a Compound scenario when the Cyberattack is timed with the Heatwave. In the first stage, we use a bilevel optimization problem to represent the adversarial rationale of a cyberattacker in the upper level. In the lower level, we model disruptions in the electric power network using an optimal power flow model. In the second stage, we couple the disruption of electricity supply with a Computable General Equilibrium model to elucidate the impacts on all economic sectors. For the New York Independent System Operator, we find that a 9% demand increase in a Heatwave may not lead to unserved load. The Cyberattack can lead to 4% of unserved electric load in Long Island, while the Compound scenario can increase unserved electric load in Long Island to 13% and affect almost 600,000 customers. Our results show that the activity of state and local government enterprises can decrease by 30% in the Compound scenario. We conclude that the vulnerability of federal, state, and local government enterprises to electricity disruptions can affect a broad range of populations.