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The transition to smart grids has increased the vulnerability of electrical power systems to advanced cyber threats. To safeguard these systems, comprehensive security measures-including preventive, detective, and reactive strategies-are necessary. As part of the critical infrastructure, securing these systems is a major research focus, particularly against cyberattacks. Many methods are developed to detect anomalies and intrusions and assess the damage potential of attacks. However, these methods require large amounts of data, which are often limited or private due to security concerns. We propose a co-simulation framework that employs an autonomous agent to execute modular cyberattacks within a configurable environment, enabling reproducible and adaptable data generation. The impact of virtual attacks is compared to those in a physical lab targeting real smart grids. We also investigate the use of large language models for automating attack generation, though current models on consumer hardware are unreliable. Our approach offers a flexible, versatile source for data generation, aiding in faster prototyping and reducing development resources and time.

The implementation of modern monitoring systems for power quality disturbances have the potential to generate substantial amounts of data, reaching a point where transmission and storage of high-frequency measurements become impractical. This research paper addresses this challenge by presenting a new, AI-based data compression method. It is based on existing, multi-level compression schemes; however, it uses state-of-the-art technologies, such as autoencoders, to improve the performance. Furthermore, it solves the problem that such algorithms usually cannot ensure an error bound. The scheme is tested on synthetically generated power quality disturbance samples. The evaluation is performed using different metrics such as final compression rate and overhead size. Compression rates between 5 and 68 were achieved depending on the error bound and noise level. Additionally, the impact of the compression on the performance of subsequent algorithms is determined by applying a classification algorithm to the decompressed data. The classification accuracy only declined by 0.8--11.9 \%, depending on the chosen error bound., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, conference, SEST 2024