  We study the security threats of power system operation brought by a class of
data injection attacks upon load forecasting algorithms. In particular, with
minimal assumptions on the knowledge and ability of the attacker, we design
attack data on input features for load forecasting algorithms in a black-box
approach. System operators can be oblivious of such wrong load forecasts, which
lead to uneconomical or even insecure decisions in commitment and dispatch.
This paper is the first attempt to bring up the security issues of load
forecasting algorithms to our knowledge, and show that accurate load
forecasting algorithm is not necessarily robust to malicious attacks. More
severely, attackers are able to design targeted attacks on system operations
strategically with additional topology information. We demonstrate the impact
of load forecasting attacks on two IEEE test cases. We show our attack strategy
is able to cause load shedding with high probability under various settings in
the 14-bus test case, and also demonstrate system-wide threats in the 118-bus
test case with limited local attacks.
