Cities and utilities are an increasingly interesting target for cybercrime. In the cyber space there are money-oriented attackers, hacktivists using hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote political or social causes, espionage experts, and cyber warriors carrying out digital assaults to attack public services and resources.

A cyberattack could potentially disrupt essential critical services, expose personal and financial data, and disable the economy of a city. Not a reassuring perspective for a Smart City!

However, unless we fully give up on innovation and digital transformation, we must acknowledge cybersecurity risks. Being 100 per cent cybersecure is an impossible goal – but we can succeed in becoming 100 per cent cybersecurity aware and ready to anticipate, mitigate and remove vulnerabilities and risks to the largest possible extent.

At Paradox Engineering, we look at cybersecurity as a combination of:

Technology – we endorse open, standard-based Internet of Things technologies and matured a security-by-design approach, which means having security built into our solutions from their very inception. In our experience, security can’t be added at the final stage of development or demanded just as reaction after delivery. We think about infrastructure and application protection from the beginning and provide Cities with intrinsically secure network systems;

People – as 90% of security breaches come out of human inadvertent errors, we promote and deliver cyber-awareness programs to educate people, share best practices and how to behave in case of in case of anomalous events. People are the first line of defense to cyber threats;

Processes – security must be managed as a cyclic process that starts from understanding the assets and the associated risks, applying measures to reduce vulnerabilities, prevent the know threats, early detect and respond to unknown threats.