Dr. Ralf C. Staudemeyer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics of the University of Passau / Germany since April 2015. He received his Dipl.-Inf. in Computer Science (eq. to M.Sc.) at the Humboldt-University in Berlin / Germany in 2002, and his Ph.D. at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town / South Africa in 2012. He was Research Assistant and Assistant Lecturer at UWC in 2003-2005; and then Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji Islands until 2007. In the period 2007-2012 Dr Staudemeyer worked as a Network-Administrator for the Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. in Germany. After completing his Ph.D. he received post-doctoral research fellowships from Rhodes University (2013), the University of South Africa (2014), and Stellenbosch University (2015). From 2015 to 2016 he was assistant scientific and technical coordinator, and leader of the security work-package in the FP7 EU research project RERUM (REliable, Resilient and secUre IoT for sMart city applications) (GA No.609094) on security & privacy in the Internet-of-Things. He is author of more than 20 publications in the areas of computer networks, machine learning, and computer security and privacy.

Smart Cities under Attack: Cybercrime and Technology Response

Smart cities face the problem of an ever growing world population living in cities. This creates huge challenges mostly related to public transport, public safety, waste management, and the supply of energy and water. Governments and municipalities must sustain city infrastructure and provide public services.

Smart cities are highly vulnerable and prone to attacks which are very hard to address or even detect in first place. These attacks may target the correct delivery or designated function of city services. It can also aim towards the theft of collected information of governments and citizens, or aim individual targets part of that infrastructure.

In this talk, we look into the threat landscape by defining the security requirements and the known threats of smart city infrastructures. Then, we investigate cybercrimes in smart cities by covering a selection of use-cases, known vulnerabilities, attack scenarios, and real-world cyberattacks already experienced. Finally, I provide security and privacy recommendations for the IoT-based smart city infrastructure.