This paper is concerned with the reliable operation of cyber‐physical systems under false data injection attacks. First of all, a robust adaptive sliding mode observer is designed to estimate the state of the power system; different from the traditional sliding mode observer, the observer we designed is not only robust to state errors but also can automatically adjust the parameter of attack identification. Secondly, a method of attack reconstruction has been given to estimate the actual attack signal. Finally, a reliable sliding mode control strategy is proposed to eliminate the impact of false data injection attacks; compared with the existing results, the designed defense strategy utilizes the reconstructed attack signal in the attack identification scheme and state error signal at the same time. Moreover, a power system with 3 generator buses and 6 load buses is taken as an simulation example to verify the availability of the proposed control strategy.