Experts named the main cyberthreats for “smart cities”

According to ABI Research, due to lack of funding, some sectors of the economy will be extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks. In particular, experts named the main cyberthreats for “smart cities”.

In 2024, financial, information and communications technology (ICT) and defense industries will account for 56% of the projected total cybersecurity costs of critical US security infrastructure. The enterprises of the electric power industry, healthcare, transport sector and water treatment systems will account for the remaining 44%. All these industries will be in danger.

According to experts, by 2024 the number of geographically distributed networks of “smart cities” will be about 1.3 billion. Almost half of them will be LPWA-LTE and LPWA.

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LPWA protocols, such as NB-IoT, try to solve at least some security issues. However, the main goal of these lightweight cellular protocols is to reduce the cost of bandwidth, increase coverage and reduce delays, and they simply are not able to cope with the increased number of cyberthreats in the field of the “smart cities”.

“Smart cities are increasingly exposed to various threats. This includes complex cyberattacks on critical infrastructure by stopping automated process control systems, misuse of LPWAN long-range energy-efficient networks, hacking communications between devices, blocking systems using ransomware, changing sensor data (for example, emergency systems) to cause massive panic, theft of data from citizens, patients and consumers, personally identifiable information, etc.”, – said Dimitrios Pavlakis, an analyst with ABI Research.

Among the key factors contributing to the growth of cyber threats in the ecosystems of the “smart city”, Pavlakis mentioned the lack of cryptographic means of protection, inadequate management of encryption keys, use of machine learning for malicious purposes, the lack of knowledge about social engineering methods and the lack of protection against DDoS attacks.