Cyber Security Threats to the Smart Cities by Mukhtar Adan

 As the population in the world is intensively growing, the number of people coming from rural areas to cities after the industrial revolution is increasing day after day, to get an environment that can stimulate production and helps economy growing.
  the last calculation of United Nation says, "68% of the world population will live in cities by 2050, adding another 2.5 billion people to urban areas, the fast majority in Asia and Africa. All these newly minted urbanites will need some where to live and work” Wainwright. This huge population gathering in to the cities need to collect and protect all their information and privacy, but to use this big data in the right way is the real challenges confront of smart cities’ builders.
     It is certain that more complex systems are more vulnerable to all kinds and levels, and Smart Cities is one of the most interconnected and complex systems in the world, which increases the level of risks and threats from cyber security attacks. And with the intensive efforts to make the cities more connected to its inhabitants it became necessary to use the Internet of things for all the related systems to control them easily, and to increase the interaction of these systems with the users, artificial intelligence were used, that makes systems more responsive to the users' desires.
       When cyber-attacks targets change from hunting individual to a whole city, which can pose real threat to the national security.  All these advanced technologies used in the basic installations for the construction of smart cities and other technologies has facilitate for hackers and saboteurs to get security gaps for those systems and exploit it for penetration and full control.
       Rather than upgrading serves by special workers, smart cities are using artificial intelligence which gives every system Automatic upgrading permissions and acquiring experience to react with the environment needs, to solve its problems itself, smart systems need to gather more information from other interconnected devises "In the current setting, each new Smart City application created requires its own unique way to fit in and become accessible to its users. What is lacking—and what defines the future—is an underlying common platform allowing such applications to become plug-and-play components in this environment" Cassandras.
              As long as there are more diverse interconnected systems there is no one shred of doubt that hackers will get their way to penetrate these systems and possess full control, by using like viruses and other malicious software which antiviruses can’t get a handle on it after they exploit security gaps. With full control permission hackers can disable more serves which has been connected to the IoT technology (Internet of things) such as vehicle control systems, digital electricity meter, advanced cooling systems parking meter, and such more internet connectable devices.
              Privacy of the users, Classifying and safety of the big data is what information security workers concern mostly, although it may applied different security levels on it, so that the system never be devoid of security gaps which can facilitate partially system penetration “System designers and builders’ aim is to actualize the basic principles of information security, regardless of the risks and attacks which possibly can make it vulnerable” Salih.

         In conclusion, the big data controlling and keeping protected is not easy at all, even when using permissions is allowed only for information technology experts which begs the question how secure the smart cities will be in the next future as long as no way to keep all controlling power and permissions in the hands of experts, because of more valuable information sharing necessity, artificial intelligent machines will meddle in that case. This makes compulsory to put forward a new policies of security protection specified for the smart cities.

1. Author: Eng. Mukhtar Adan Isak

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Work cited
Cassandras‏. G Cassandras. “Smart cities as cyber-physical social systems”, Engineering 2 (2), 156-158, 2016. ‏
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095809916309420
Saleh. Mansur. ”Information security of the smart cities”, Science and technology magazine, edition 111, KACST, May 2014,Pp(34-37)
Wainwright. Oliver. “The next era of human progress: what lies behind the global new cities epidemic” The Guardian, 8 Jul 2019.
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jul/08/