  Security issue of distributed state estimation (DSE) is an important prospect
for the rapidly growing smart grid ecosystem. Any coordinated cyberattack
targeting the distributed system of state estimators can cause unrestrained
estimation errors and can lead to a myriad of security risks, including failure
of power system operation. This article explores the security threats of a
smart grid arising from the exploitation of DSE vulnerabilities. To this aim,
novel adversarial strategies based on two-stage data availability and integrity
attacks are proposed towards a distributed industrial Internet of Things-based
smart grid. The former's attack goal is to prevent boundary data exchange among
distributed control centers, while the latter's attack goal is to inject a
falsified data to cause local and global system unobservability. The proposed
framework is evaluated on IEEE standard 14-bus system and benchmarked against
the state-of-the-art research. Experimental results show that the proposed
two-stage cyberattack results in an estimated error of approximately 34.74%
compared to an error of the order of 10^-3 under normal operating conditions.
