The timeline of human history is marked by inflection points of major technological advancement. The plow, the printing press, the telegraph, the steam engine, electricity, the telephone, the internet: each of these breakthroughs precipitated tectonic shifts in how people lived and worked. Now, in the early part of the 21st century, we stand witness to the birth of a new industrial revolution built on 5th generation cellular technology - 5G network.
As the name implies, 5G network follows a developmental chain. First came 1G, the first generation of cellular communication that freed us to make voice calls without being tethered...
Not even 30 years separate us from the end of the Cold War. Yet, we appear to be witnessing the emergence of a new one, a technology Cold War between the United States and China. This time, instead of a ‘red under the bed’, the US government has declared there is one at the back door. It accuses Chinese technology companies of deliberately building vulnerabilities into their tech, allowing the Chinese to access and control the 5G critical infrastructure, and through it the connected devices and machinery at will.
Headlines are dominated by the case against Huawei, and debate continues...
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities. The UN estimates that by 2050 that proportion will be 68% - more than 6 billion people living in high-density conditions. This raises significant challenges. What is the best way to ensure that human needs are met in a fair and equitable way? How will we face challenges like resource strain, waste and pollution management, traffic congestion and connectivity?
In response to these wicked problems, cities are increasingly relying on smart technologies to foster greater efficiency and sustainable growth. These interventions do not, however, come without their own complications. Just...
Since the dawn of the 21st Century, the ways in which people and organizations that use the Internet experience, perceive and act in the world is radically changing. We interact with physical objects and systems well beyond our sight and comprehension. Our cars, homes, factories and public transportation are controlled increasingly by computer chips and sensors. This interconnectedness already exceeds much of last century’s science fiction imaginings, but is poised to accelerate even more dramatically with the advent of 5G.
Popular telecom carrier driven expectations about the speed and capacity of 5G consumer mobile service tend to obscure the broader...
Getting smart about security in smart systems
Smart used to be something we called people or pets. It wasn't a term one would use to describe one's hairbrush. That is changing, of course, in an era of accelerating digital transformation. Now we have smart homes, smart cities, smart grids, smart refrigerators and, yes, even smart hairbrushes. What's not so smart, though, is the way the cybersecurity and cyber-kinetic security risks of these systems are often overlooked, and with new horizon technologies like 5G, these problems are set to grow exponentially.
Cyber-physical systems and the smartification of our world
Cyber-connected objects have become...
Targeted cyberattacks against critical infrastructure (CI) are increasing on a global scale. Critical systems are rapidly being connected to the internet, affording attackers opportunities to target virtual systems that operate and monitor physical structures and physical processes through various modes of cyberattack.
When people think of cyberattacks, their minds often go first to the financial sector. After all, that’s the type of attack people hear about most frequently; it’s where the money is and it’s what seems most natural for cybercriminals to target. Enterprises frequently focus on such cyber-enabled financial crimes to the point that they give too little thought...
In their growing efforts to increase efficiencies through digitization and automation, railways are becoming increasingly vulnerable to cyber-kinetic attacks as they move away from strictly mechanical systems and bespoke standalone systems to digital, open-platform, standardized equipment built using Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) components.
In addition, the increasing use of networked control and automation systems enable remote access of public and private networks. Finally, the large geographical spread of railway systems, involving multiple providers and even multiple countries, and the vast number of people involved in operating and maintaining those widespread systems offer attackers an almost unlimited number of attack...
A growing number of today’s entertainment options show protagonists battling cyber-attacks that target the systems at the heart of our critical infrastructure whose failure would cripple modern society. It’s easy to watch such shows and pass off their plots as something that could never happen. The chilling reality is that those plots are often based on real cyber-kinetic threats that either have already happened, are already possible, or are dangerously close to becoming reality.
Cyberattacks occur daily around the world. Only when one achieves sufficient scope to grab the attention of the news media – such as the WannaCry ransomware...
The fact that cyber-kinetic attacks rarely appear on mainstream news doesn’t mean they don’t happen. They happen more frequently than you would think. Many, for various reasons, aren’t even reported to agencies charged with combatting them.
This hinders security experts in understanding the full scope and recognizing the trends in this growing problem. We’ll highlight examples of cyber-kinetic incidents and attacks in this chapter. Some were malfunctions that, nonetheless, demonstrated cyber-physical system vulnerabilities. Some were collateral damage from hacking or computer viruses. The vulnerabilities these exposed inspired a growing number of targeted cyber-kinetic attacks in recent years.
The Beginning of Cyber-Kinetic...
Below is my attempt to list of all published 5G, IoT and "Smart Everything"-related security guidelines, frameworks and standards. If you are aware of additional entries that should be here, please let me know at [email protected]
We live in a world in which the way we observe and control it is radically changing. Increasingly, we interact with physical objects through the filter of what computational systems embedded in them tell us, and we adjust them based on what those systems relate.
We do this on our phones, in our cars, in our homes, in our factories and, increasingly, in our cities. Physical objects are so interconnected that we simply take those connections for granted, as if being able to unlock your car by pushing a button on your key fob, unlocking it with your phone or...