The smart grid as a critical domain faces a complex cybersecurity threat landscape today. This is made worse by the public accessibility of large language models, which can be used by attackers to devise evolving attacks. This Special Issue seeks to address this growing problem by inviting contributions that advance both foundational studies and practical defenses. Submissions may address attack vectors ranging from modern vectors executed by advanced persistent threats to conventional templates such as false data injection, denial-of-service and coordinated stealth attacks. We are particularly interested in original research articles, reviews and case studies on threat detection and mitigation, evasion, resilience and deception. We also invite articles proposing benchmark standards to evaluate the rising breadth of defense frameworks across a common scale. Additionally, papers on cyber–physical testbed design propositions are also invited.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- FDI, DoS and DDoS attacks
- Advanced persistent threats and rootkit-based intrusions
- LLM-assisted attack modeling and defense
- Physics-based and data-driven attack detection and mitigation
- Moving target defense and deception strategies
- Resilient control architectures for smart grids
- Secure communication protocols and cryptographic key management
- Privacy-preserving data exchange and federated learning
- Benchmark standards for defense framework evaluation
- Hardware-in-the-loop and cyber–physical testbed design
- Security of SCADA, AMI, and IoT-connected grid assets
- Distributed energy resource and microgrid cybersecurity