Making smart cities cybersecure

This report, written by Piyush Pandey, Deborah Golden, Sean Peasley, and Mahesh Kelkar for Deloitte, is aimed to explore how to keep smart cities cyber secure as physical infrastructure combines with digital. The authors begin by briefly exploring what a smart city is and introducing some of the added threats that they have to deal with by giving the example of Atlanta being hit by a ransomware attack in 2018 that took weeks to recover from. They then dive deeper into the cyber risks that smart cities face, boiling them down to three factors: convergence of the cyber and physical worlds, interoperability between legacy and new systems, and the integration of formerly separate city services and infrastructure. In order to successfully implement a smart city, the authors claim that the city must take a holistic approach to cybersecurity, creating a framework to provide the city with best practices and principles in managing these attacks. Ultimately, the authors give the steps cities must think about going into the future to create a secure smart city to be: “syncing smart city and cyber strategy, formalizing cyber and data governance, and build strategic partnerships to grow cyber capabilities.”