We are committed to delivering services and building products that contribute to cyber-safe smart cities.
To go beyond a commitment, we joined Securing Smart Cities (SSC), a not-for-profit global initiative that aims to solve the existing and future cybersecurity problems of smart cities through collaboration between companies, governments, media outlets, other not-for-profit initiatives and individuals across the world.
“The cybersecurity of a smart city involves both strategic planning for future cities and the recognition of issues in cities that already have ’smart’ components.”
— Securing Smart Cities
Smart city cybersecurity and cyber threats have been making headlines in the past couple of months, with the San Francisco public transportation system hacking, Ukraine’s power grid hack or the ransomware attack on an LA hospital among a few of the unique and escalating cyber attacks.
Why are smart cities vulnerable?
Smart cities use IT, IoT (Internet of Things) and various data solutions to manage a wide range of city services, including smart transportation, smart traffic control devices, sensors, CCTV cameras, wastewater treatment plants, grids and more. Many cities, for example, are deploying IoT devices to join the smart city revolution without fully analysing and comprehending how secure these technologies are. Kaspersky Lab, also part of the SSC initiative, recently found a large amount of connected speeding cameras installed in smart cities, that turned out to be easily hackable. In 2014, Cesar Cerrudo, an Argentine security researcher and chief technology officer at IOActive Labs, showed how 200,000 traffic control sensors installed in major hubs like Washington; New York; San Francisco; Seattle; Lyon, France; and Melbourne, Australia, were exposed to cyber attacks. The information coming from these sensors could be accessed from 1,500 feet away because one company had failed to encrypt the data transfer process.
“Even in not so smart cities, those devices are already processing gigabytes of citizens’ data and unfortunately are not always secure enough to defend against third parties set on manipulating them.”
— Cesar Cerrudo
Securing Smart Cities’ Mission
SSC aims to address security concerns and ensure that current and future smart cities are being developed cyber-safely. SSC was created in 2015 to help purchasers approach vendors to apply technology in a safe way, help vendors to produce more secure products, create research that will be used to identify new threats and also find solutions for all the problems that are identified.
We take security very seriously!
We joined this initiative as a supporting organisation to learn from and contribute to the knowledge base and best practices when it comes to cyber-safe cities and communities. When it comes to our work, providing our USMART data sharing platform for future smart cities and communities - both security and integrity are crucial. For this reason, we are building USMART to be first and foremost super secure, super simple and super scalable.
Do you want to join Securing Smart Cities?
SSC is open to new participants. All are welcome, including city authorities, security researchers and security vendors, as well as vendors of equipment and software used in public automation infrastructure.
