Robust Planning of False Data Injection Attack on Electricity Markets in Smart Grids

False data injection attack (FDIA) is a destructive cyber threat to the economic performance of electricity markets in smart grids. A cyber attacker can make a huge financial profit by implementing an FDIA through penetrating the virtual transactions of the electricity markets and manipulating electricity prices. In this paper, a new approach to planning an absolutely stealthily FDIA is presented with the aim of achieving maximum financial profit from the perspective of a cyber attacker participating in virtual transactions from two markets of day-ahead (DA) and real-time (RT). A common hypothesis in studies of FDIAs against electricity markets is that the attacker has complete information about the smart grid. But the fact is that the attacker has limited resources and can hardly access all the network information. This paper proposes a robust approach in designing an attack strategy under incomplete network information conditions. In particular, it is assumed that the attacker has uncertainties about the network modeling matrices. The validity of the proposed method is evaluated based on the IEEE 14-bus standard system using the Matpower tool. Numerical results confirm the relative success of the proposed attack in cases of varying degrees of incomplete information.