In a physical microgrid system, equipment failures, manual misbehavior of equipment, and power quality can be affected by intentional cyberattacks, made more dangerous by the widespread use of established communication networks via sensors. This paper comprehensively reviews smart grid challenges on cyber-physical and cyber security systems, standard protocols, communication, and sensor technology. Existing supervised learning-based Machine Learning (ML) methods for identifying cyberattacks in smart grids mostly rely on instances of both normal and attack events for training. Additionally, for supervised learning to be effective, the training dataset must contain representative examples of various attack situations having different patterns, which is challenging. Therefore, we reviewed a novel Data Mining (DM) approach based on unsupervised rules for identifying False Data Injection Cyber Attacks (FDIA) in smart grids using Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) data. The unsupervised algorithm is excellent for discovering unidentified assault events since it only uses examples of typical events to train the detection models. The datasets used in our study, which looked at some well-known unsupervised detection methods, helped us assess the performances of different methods. The performance comparison with popular unsupervised algorithms is better at finding attack events if compared with supervised and Deep Learning (DL) algorithms.

Different issues will be raised and highlighted by emerging distributed generations (DGs) into modern power systems in which the islanding detection is the most important. In the islanding situation, a part of the system which consists of at least one DG, passive grid, and local load, becomes fully separated from the main grid. Several detection methods of islanding have been proposed in recent researches based on measured electrical parameters of the system. However, islanding detection based on local measurements suffers from the non-detection zone (NDZ) and undesirable detection during grid-connected events. This paper proposes a passive islanding detection algorithm for all types of DGs by appropriate combining the measured frequency, voltage, current, and phase angle and their rate of changes at the point of common coupling (PCC). The proposed algorithm detects the islanding situation, even with the exact zero power mismatches. Proposed algorithm discriminates between the islanding situation and non-islanding disturbances, such as short circuit faults, capacitor faults, and load switching in a proper time and without mal-operation. In addition, the performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated under different scenarios by performing the algorithm on the IEEE 13-bus distribution system.