  While the increasing penetration of information and communication technology
into distribution grid brings numerous benefits, it also opens up a new threat
landscape, particularly through cyberattacks. To provide a basis for
countermeasures against such threats, this paper addresses the investigation of
the impact and manifestations of cyberattacks on smart grids by replicating the
power grid in a secure, isolated, and controlled laboratory environment as a
cyber-physical twin. Currently, detecting intrusions by unauthorized third
parties into the central monitoring and control system of grid operators,
especially attacks within the grid perimeter, is a major challenge. The
development and validation of methods to detect and prevent coordinated and
timed attacks on electric power systems depends not only on the availability
and quality of data from such attack scenarios, but also on suitable realistic
investigation environments. However, to create a comprehensive investigation
environment, a realistic representation of the study object is required to
thoroughly investigate critical cyberattacks on grid operations and evaluate
their impact on the power grid using real data. In this paper, we demonstrate
our cyber-physical twin approach using a microgrid in the context of a
cyberattack case study.
