Mission & Overview

Introduction

I have been working in cybersecurity for over 20 years now and over the last 6 years have become more involved with emerging fields such as Connected and Autonomous Vehicle, IoT and ICS integration with Cloud technology. I was lucky enough to spend a year looking at the cybersecurity strategy for a major Smart City project and from that work this blog and the research has evolved.

Mission
The purpose of this website is to provide a platform for material produced as part of a research project to explore the cyber security requirements of Smart Cities. Cities around the world will undergo significant transformation over the next 10 years as they build on existing smart city initiatives or plan their new strategies. Cyber security will need to play a key role if these cities and their strategies are to be successful.

Overview
The development of Smart Cities in the next few years will, in part, be fueled by the rise of 5G mobile networks, maturing IOT services and connectivity and our insatiable desire for data, surveillance and monitoring. Cities have been fundamental to human development and their features and services shape many aspects of our lives and as such how they evolve over the next 10 and 20 years will very important to the many global issues today. These issues include poverty, employment, crime, air pollution, global warming, slums and over crowding, affordable housing and the general health and safety of the citizens that inhabit the city. I am sure there are many more but the key ones will contribute in several ways to the motivations behind and the goals and objectives of cyber threats and attacks.

Take poverty and employment as the first example. Crime has always provided a means for those without income or employment to make some sort of living and gain access to cash. As cities now look to ways to move away from cash to electronic means will those without access to devices needed to transact and purchase goods and services be able to live in the cities of the future? Will they look at alternative means which may be illegal devices and services acquired through illegal operations and supported by illegal cyber services. Perhaps they will gain employment in illegal operations that are now emerging to support current cyber crime activities. They may also turn to cyber crime themselves to provide a living.

A second example is hacktivism where groups of like minded people unhappy with specific or multiple issues e.g. surveillance, privacy, pollution, poverty or employment may look to the means to protest through the disruption or destruction of public or private assets or services within cities. Smart cities of the future may be very vulnerable to groups who consider their key channel of protest to be electronic or internet-based activism.

Consider, as an example of this, the recent issues surrounding Sidewalk Labs and the Toronto Waterfront Project. A recent article by CNN – Alphabet’s plans to track people in its ‘smart city’ ring alarm bells – may well be the sort of situation that attracts Hacktivist interest.

The final example is crime and terror. Those involved in these two areas will evolve to exploit any vulnerability they can to further their aims and motivations. Smart cities of the future and their citizens may well become the victims to a variety of cyber attacks and threats as the internet offers these threat actors the ability to operate, exploit and attack from anywhere in the World.

My update in 2021 included the use of digital twin technology to further cyber security either directly in event monitoring or to support AI and Machine Learning development.