Smart cities incentivize nation states and cybercriminals to attack---extinction, grid collapse, critical infrastructure collapse.

Indeed, smart cities are dependent on machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions and decision-making. This is, in part, a product of the sheer number of inputs and the frequency and speed with which associated calculations need to be completed. In the case of the energy grid, it would be impossible for a human operator to process all the data necessary to make decisions at the speed required by the system. However, while M2M decision-making (M2MD) is an unavoidable and beneficial feature of smart cities, it is also one of the greatest risks.

NEW CITY, NEW RISK

M2MD is a highly promising means of ensuring efficient automation across smart cities. However, given the absence of human operators, the risk of a cascading error is significant. A cascading error refers to the potential for a small, unchecked mistake to spread through a system and become a systemic risk. For instance, if a minor computing error caused a smart electricity reader to transmit inaccurate data readings to its control centre for a period of time this could lead to an automated, and mistaken, assessment that a particular private organisation’s premises required an increased amount of electricity. This would necessitate rerouting some of the existing energy supply to this facility which, in turn, could culminate in increased costs for the affected business, as well as for the city, and a reduced pool of electricity for other companies and citizens. Although minimal at this scale, the consequences of such errors when they affect a larger area – an entire block or an industrial zone for example – could be far more substantial.

SMART CITIES AND CYBER THREATS

Beyond the potential for human or computer error, smart cities will provide cyber threat actors with a large attack surface to target and potentially exploit and incorporate into broader campaigns:

Cybercriminals

As we have described above, smart cities will be composed of thousands – if not millions – of interconnected devices. Such a structure is a boon to criminal actors able to create or purchase and subsequently deploy self-propagating malware, variants of which have been known to proliferate across multiple connected networks. These ‘worms’ could be used to acquire easily commoditized information such as healthcare information, social security numbers and banking credentials, or even to take control of a significant number of systems.

Were attackers able to successfully hijack these systems they could then be used for extremely powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or to hold an entire city for ransom in extortion attacks. Ransomware variants could be designed to encrypt and cripple [destroy] an entire city’s grid, with ransom demands likely to be considerable in such a scenario. These tactics could be highly profitable for cybercriminals and represent a natural evolution of trends that we have observed in the current cybercriminal community. Incident response will become increasingly difficult in the case of city-wide compromise. Private sector organisations and municipal authorities will share ownership of systems and the responsibility for their security. Beyond adding legal and financial costs for the private sector, this will create the need for highly complex pre-planned incident response schemes involving multiple parties.

Cyber activists

As cyber activist groups grow increasingly capable and in some cases, more radical, smart cities will provide them with an attack surface enabling a broad range of attacks from those akin to nuisances such as defacements of a city’s billboards, to the more extreme targeting of a smart city’s energy grid with the aim of physical destruction.

In addition, many cyber activist groups are supporting physical protesters by launching cyber attacks. This practice in a smart city environment could allow cyber activists to take a leading role in coercing governments and private sector organisations in meeting their demands.

The potential destructiveness of a cyber attack on smart cities is such that even the threat of compromise of the city’s system is likely to be treated by governments and businesses as an existential one. When threat actors such as cyber activists, who arguably lack the self-control of other groups, have the possibility of causing serious physical damages, the security of smart cities becomes essential to the cities’ survival.

Nation states

As the underlying network of smart cities will encompass most aspects of life within the city, if that network were to be compromised by an attacker, it would grant them unfettered access to a target individual or organisation. For instance, state-owned competitors could compromise a smart city’s infrastructure to gather intelligence on a large number of rival private sector firms. This information could include movements of their executives within the city, private and commercial communications grabbed from the ubiquitous presence of ‘free Wi-Fi hotspots’ managed by the city, and many more. Moreover, organisations operating within the city are likely to have their networks overlap to some extent with the city’s own network, or at the very least, have frequent data transfers from their networks to that of the city. This would enable highly advanced threat actors such as nation states to exploit weaknesses within a city’s infrastructure to reach a target organisation and compromise the confidentiality of its network.

Beyond traditional espionage operations, the large-scale destruction or disruption of physical infrastructure via computer systems could become a technical reality with the advent of smart cities. The interconnectedness of systems within smart cities will lead to the reliance of components on the availability of the entire system to function properly. As such, an advanced cyber attack seeking to destroy parts of the system could have catastrophic cascading effects onto the wider network. This would enable a determined nation state actor to cause large-scale physical destruction throughout an entire city.