International. "The most important and urgent problems of today's technology are no longer the satisfactions of primary needs or archetypal desires, but the repair of the evils and damages of yesterday's technology," said the late Hungarian-British electrical engineer and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dennis Gabor, CBE, FRS.
In our modern world, technology is often the solution to problems caused by technology. In few places is this more evident than in smart buildings, where a rapidly evolving technological landscape is creating cybersecurity problems that demand more technological solutions. The proliferation of smart devices in our buildings brings enormous benefits for owners and occupants, but also increases vulnerability to cyberattacks. Every digital endpoint creates a cyber risk, so as we move forward with the digitization of buildings, we must also move forward with smarter cybersecurity.
"The increased use of internet-connected sensors is turning high-rise offices into computers with a roof that must be protected against breaches," said Arie Barendrecht, CEO of WiredScore, which recently began offering certification for digital infrastructure in buildings. "There's another side to everything smart and connected, and that's a bigger risk."
Basically, everything smart and connected poses a cyber threat. In 2018, hackers used weaknesses in a connected fish tank thermometer to gain access to sensitive information about high rollers in a Las Vegas casino database. In 2019, hackers infiltrated the connected emergency response system of two suburbs of Dallas, Texas, and activated their tornado warning sirens. Previously, in 2016, the Mirai botnet hijacked printers and connected cameras to remove many of the world's most popular websites, including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, The Guardian, and CNN.
"In a relatively short time, we've taken a system built to withstand destruction by nuclear weapons and made it vulnerable to toasters," tweeted Jeff Jarmoc, head of security at global commercial service Salesforce.
An obvious solution to the problem of hacking connected devices is to disconnect. The fewer connected devices we have, the less vulnerable we will be to cyberattacks, but that's not the "smart" direction the world is taking right now. If we want all the benefits that smart devices bring, we need to find a way to better protect our connected technology, and the solution seems to be more technology. Many experts now suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) is the answer to keeping up with malicious software by better understanding the threat landscape to predict, prevent, and protect against IoT-based cyberattacks.
"AI can be deployed to provide cyber risk analysis to improve organizational resilience and understand cyber risk. AI technologies can improve threat intelligence, prediction, and protection, as well as enable faster attack detection and response while reducing the need for human cybersecurity experts. AI can learn from security analysts and improve their performance over time, saving time and making better decisions," explains the latest report: AI and Machine Learning in Smart Business Buildings. "These 'smart cyberattacks' capabilities are urgently needed as cyberattacks continue to grow in volume and sophistication."
However, it is not as simple as applying AI to cybersecurity systems. First, companies will need significant computing resources and data processing power to build and maintain AI systems. Second, AI systems must be trained in many different datasets of malicious code, malware code, and anomalies, but getting those resources can be difficult and expensive. Finally, hackers also use artificial intelligence to identify weaknesses in security systems, including ai-enabled security systems. Therefore, cybersecurity must introduce artificial intelligence to keep up with criminals and this will soon become an endless AI arms race. We need another approach.
"Enterprise security teams rarely have full oversight and often control these devices, which can make it difficult to gather information about the devices. With networks and device connections distributed across cloud, mobile, and on-premises environments, blind spots are likely to arise. Where they do, attackers can exploit those oversights to hide their malicious activity," the report continues. "To protect against these threats and more seamlessly integrate data from IoT devices into Digital Twin's smart building platforms and solutions, IT departments and building operators can leverage device discovery tools that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to better determine the configuration and security status of devices on the IoT network."
Smart building cybersecurity must use all the tools at its disposal to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, and these tools must be integrated for maximum protection. AI can provide an important element of this integrated smart building cybersecurity ecosystem, always learning how to better protect devices and systems from attacks, but only if the computing and data needs of AI can be met.
AI alone is not the solution to defend against cyber threats that are also powered by AI, but an AI-enabled cybersecurity ecosystem linked to digital twins and other building systems is certainly a huge step forward in the never-ending battle against hackers in our increasingly connected buildings.
Source: Memoori.
