The “smart city” is an exciting concept in which technology is used to improve the lives of citizens, facilitate urban governance, and allocate resources more efficiently and sustainably.

With the continuous evolution of the level of urban governance, a vast smart city construction movement is in full swing around the world.

From Barcelona to Milton Keynes to Miami, a number of building initiatives are being implemented all around us, including solar-powered smart bins and a wide range of technology sensors based on the Internet of Things that enable automatic optimization of “smart utilities” with big data.

However, under the “appearance” of smart cities, there are also unknown security “hidden dangers”, if you do not pay attention to these “hidden dangers”, smart cities or will be on the edge of “danger”.

This is not alarmist.

DS200DDTBG1A

With the coverage of the urban Internet of Things, everything between cities will become more and more interconnected and dependent on technology, and cities will become more and more “smart” at the same time, which means that they will inevitably carry more technical infrastructure and data, from a security point of view, it also indicates that they will be more and more vulnerable to new threats.

Last year, we witnessed a series of ransomware attacks targeting cities, towns, and government organizations. Augusta, Maine, was hit by a cyberattack that knocked out its network and forced the shutdown of downtown, hackers stole about $498,000 from Tallahassee, Florida, and a ransomware attack shut down Internet and other online government services in Louisiana.

These are just a few of hundreds of cases, but they show how the digitization of urban infrastructure, if not adequately protected, can leave entire cities at the mercy of hackers.

In these cases, cities suffer mainly economic and reputational damage. Like most cyberattacks in both the private and public sectors, they are motivated simply by money.

However, it cannot be ruled out that smart cities in the future will also face the risk of political and activist motivated attacks, industrial control systems targeting critical infrastructure may stop providing utilities to citizens, they may manipulate sensor data – such as disaster alert systems – to cause public panic or steal citizen data. Recently, in the wake of the civil unrest caused by police brutality across the United States, hackers collectively and anonymously released a large number of police files from various departments across the United States.