Urban cybersecurity is a manageable risk

Digitalization is widely believed to be a net gain for economies and societies. But it also comes with costs, such as damage from cyberattacks. But do the gains from digitalization globally outweight the costs? The authors of a 2017 study argue that "[t]he balance between those benefits and costs, over time and across countries, remains poorly understood." The result of this information gap is a bifurcated set of narratives—"either (1) continued rapid benefit growth with new waves of ICT technology; or (2) increasing cyber-attack costs will come to swamp benefits."

The study is the first effort to estimate the overall net cost-benefit of digitalization globally. Using 4 scenarios to represent combinations of high and low innovation, and high and low cyberconflict futures, they found a range of potential net benefit from ICTs range from $100 to $140 trillion through 2030, depending on which cybersecurity scenario plays out. This suggests that cybersecurity broadly, and by inference for smart cities and urban tech is a manageable risk over the long run and not an existential threat to progress.