Smart cities: can they be hacked?

The ultimate takeover of a country could be performed by getting inside the technologies of a nation. It’s something that you are more likely to see on the silver screen than on the news.

But could smart cities being hacked move from fiction to reality?

Why do we need smart cities?

Some would argue that it’s not needed — that too much technology loses the impact of person to person contact. Others believe that technology can be used to help people live healthier, happier lives.

Of course, it depends on the style of living that you’d like to get accustomed to. Some people prefer rural living, and that’s unlikely to be affected by smart city changes any time soon because the focus of these technologies is in large-population sites.

What are smart city solutions?

Before you start to think about smart city solutions, you first need to understand the problems. What are you trying to solve? How are you trying to make people’s lives better? What can we be doing to make things better/easier for people?

Our client Exeter City Futures, for example, has focused its attention on sustainability and inclusion, choosing to support and invest their resources in technologies developed locally that solve carbon and global warming challenges.

Different cities will have different priorities, once they identify the challenges they are trying to solve. Will you focus your resources on the elderly or the very young? Are certain areas with more deprivation going to need more basic investment before we start thinking about smart city technologies?

What are smart city technologies?

Once you have a clear idea of the problems you want to solve, you can start looking at smart city technologies, which typically come into two categories: city-wide, or at home.

On the city-wide scale, there is almost too much choice. From pavements that generate electricity when people walk on them, to lamp posts with sensors that monitor pollution, from smart bins that measure their filling rate, to smarter networks.

Some cities are already implementing these city-wide technologies. In Bristol, UK, a partnership between two of our clients, Bristol is Open and Zeetta Networks, as part of the DCMS 5G-SmartTourism trial, installed sensors around the harbourside on the 5G network to ensure that anyone who fell into the water could be rescued, preventing deaths.

At the other end of the scale are the home smart city technologies, and you may already have some of these installed in your own home. These include smart doorbells, smart fridges, technology that allows you to feed your pets remotely, and more.

Can smart cities be hacked?

Citywide technologies are usually not hackable because there is strong security put in place from the outset which is updated frequently, reducing the risk.

But home-based smart city technologies are more easily hackable, especially if people don’t update the security of those devices when you buy them. Most of the time, these devices arrive with passwords as simple as ‘password’ or the device name, which can be dangerous for those using smart devices at home and at work.

The danger only increases when you realise that people who use those devices then move into a smart city where they are connecting with many other devices. It only takes one weak link to cause a problem, something that our client BlackDice points out regularly.

Originally published at https://oggadoon.co.uk on April 23, 2020.