Cybersecurity in Smart Cities

Cybersecurity in Smart Cities

What Is Smart City?

A smart city can effectively integrate and utilize the city’s resources and further improve the city’s production efficiency and service capabilities. A smart city must have the ability to collect information, transmit information, process information, and interact with information in order to build the foundation of smart capabilities. The construction of a smart city is bound to focus on the application of information technology.

Smart cities can be considered as the advanced stage of urban informatization, which must involve the innovative application of information technology. Information technology is based on emerging popular technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, mobile internet, and big data. Smart cities are a complex, interactive system. In this system, information technology and other resource elements are optimally deployed and work together to promote smarter city operations.

Smart cities are an emerging model of urban development. The service objects of smart cities are targeted at urban subjects—government, enterprises, and individuals. The result is the transformation, improvement, and improvement of urban production and lifestyle, which ultimately manifests itself in a better urban life for human beings.

The idea of ​​a smart city is to collect information through connected devices and use those devices for logistics to make life more comfortable. If it goes well, every step from your home to your office will be convenient. Whenever you arrive at a shopping mall or supermarket, you will know exactly where to park your car. Nevertheless, without proper security measures, the risk of cyber threats can make life in a smart city more expensive, dangerous and painful.

How to Secure Smart Cities?

Let’s start at the bottom and step up carefully from there. Although governments have found it difficult to implement basic Internet privacy and security rules, many countries have begun to realize the importance of implementing cybersecurity regulations in their smart cities. For example, the European Union (EU) has developed a GDPR to protect the data privacy of all individual citizens in the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA). The management of smart cities requires clear boundaries to protect the scope of information and its right to use from the source. Beyond that, mobile and web applications that are responsible for interconnecting IoT devices ought to have minimized mistakes and created by highly experienced developers.

Every new technology invented nowadays may become a new tool for hackers, or create a new vulnerability to penetrate the cross-network of our smart city. Because of the huge number of connected devices in a smart city and the complexity of the entire network, the manpower is not enough to make the required efforts to respond to the evolving threats in cybersecurity. We need security solutions that can detect evolving cyber threats and prevent them from disrupting infrastructure in smart cities.

In this case, a possible solution could be to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) for cybersecurity. AI security elements can be programmed to learn and detect any foreign elements in the smart city infrastructure. However, as there has been news and questions rising regarding the bias-ness of AI, we need to conduct more research-based development of AI in cybersecurity following well-defined legal and ethical guidelines.

 

Contact LIFARS and See If Your Organization

Passes the Cybersecurity Checks

 

 


Credits: https://readwrite.com/2020/01/30/cybersecurity-ensuring-sanity-in-smart-cities/