China Is Studying How to Hack and Crash Our Power Grids

China Is Studying How to Hack and Crash Our Power Grids​

by the

Head of Cybersecurity Research at CTU UCEEB​

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been conducting a large-scale bibliometric study on publicly available Chinese academic literature related to hacking and crashing Western power grids. In this article, I’m sharing the main findings of that study.
EDIT (20.6.2025, 8:54 CET): All of the Chinese academic articles I examined are scientific, peer-reviewed articles published in impact-factor journals (mostly Western publishers), which go through independent review by at least three independent reviewers before being published. In this case, it is not possible for something to be presented by Chinese merely to incite fear or to confuse us— impacted technical scientific literature simply does not work that way.
What I found is a vast body of technically advanced work. Across dozens of publications, Chinese researchers study how failures propagate through the Western power grids, how critical nodes or links can be identified and targeted, and how to optimize the effectiveness of these attacks. In many cases, simulations are conducted specifically to identify the minimal effort or cost required to trigger a large-scale outage or systemic collapse. Many papers simulate targeted or hybrid attacks, such as node removal, edge overload, or false data injections. Several studies explicitly focus on identifying the most effective attack vectors under constraints such as limited resources, partial system knowledge, or time sensitivity. Some publications models control algorithms that minimize the number of manipulated nodes needed to induce power grid-wide failure.

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