Security is an essential aspect of the success of a Smart City.
Due to the constant increase in people residing in urban environments, cities must focus on solutions and technologies to transform themselves digitally, thus being able to effectively manage everything from urban mobility to automation and building control.
With the development of these Smart Cities, local governments must take into account the safety of the city. This includes the general safety of the city such as road safety, the citizen's own safety and cybersecurity.
In today post we will describe three of the main pillars a City takes care to become a Safe City:
Incident Management
Video Solutions
Cybersecurity
Automatic Incident Detection (DAI) systems are a reliable solution for detecting incidents and anomalies in traffic. This is an indispensable tool for making quick and adequate decisions according to the type of incident recorded. Innovative solutions will allow traditional DAI systems to include other streams of data to help the operators to speed up on their decision making. These integrations can be real-time traffic monitoring, license plate recognition, traffic video surveillance, location of city assets such as police, ambulance and firefighting, among others.
Apart from protecting citizens from urban incidents, cities are also investing heavily in video surveillance solutions. The increase of capacity of computing has allowed cities to build applications on top of the video feeds generated by traditional CCTV systems. These solutions allow Cities to create contextual and metadata information bringing much more intelligence to the operations on which camera they should be looking at. Among many examples, the new applications we will find are: the analysis of moving crowds in urban areas, airports, train stations, shopping centers and sports stadiums, among others. It is also used for forensic analysis, due to the ability to search intensively for subjects in video recordings, for the location of suspects or automatic classification.
Another point to keep in mind is the importance of cybersecurity. In recent years, cities have become more vulnerable to this type of security, and vulnerability in cybersecurity can have serious consequences for smart cities.
These attacks include phishing, malicious code, website intrusions and social engineering… Social engineering attacks for example are a significant threat to Smart Cities and also a challenge to IoT. Attackers trick a user to perform an action that will cause a breach in the system's information security, this can cause serious problems such as; Interruption and damage to the signaling system of trains and trams, causing accidents, damage to the water system that causes waste of water, damage to nuclear power plants...
Due to the increase in the vulnerabilities of cities, governments have sharpened their measures in cybersecurity, engineers and architects try to introduce security from the conceptual stage. Ultimately, vulnerability must be addressed at all levels to mitigate the serious consequences that can put the entire Smart City at risk.
