  Malicious attacks in the power system can eventually result in a large-scale
cascade failure if not attended on time. These attacks, which are traditionally
classified into \emph{physical} and \emph{cyber attacks}, can be avoided by
using the latest and advanced detection mechanisms. However, a new threat
called \emph{cyber-physical attacks} which jointly target both the physical and
cyber layers of the system to interfere the operations of the power grid is
more malicious as compared with the traditional attacks. In this paper, we
propose a new cyber-physical attack strategy where the transmission line is
first physically disconnected, and then the line-outage event is masked, such
that the control center is misled into detecting as an obvious line outage at a
different position in the local area of the power system. Therefore, the
topology information in the control center is interfered by our attack. We also
propose a novel procedure for selecting vulnerable lines, and analyze the
observability of our proposed framework. Our proposed method can effectively
and continuously deceive the control center into detecting fake line-outage
positions, and thereby increase the chance of cascade failure because the
attention is given to the fake outage. The simulation results validate the
efficiency of our proposed attack strategy.
