CRC Spotlight: Smart Cities: Future Urban Environments in the Crosshairs of Cyber Threats and Information Disorder

Modern smart cities rely on extensively interconnected digital infrastructures that link not only administrative processes, but also mobility, energy systems, communication networks, urban services, and private-sector platforms. This dense connectivity creates significant exposure to hybrid threats in which technical cyberattacks overlap with strategic influence efforts, affecting both critical infrastructure and the wider informational sphere of a city.

Against this backdrop, the article analyzes how smart cities evolve into environments where cyber vulnerabilities and informational fragilities reinforce one another, creating conditions for the emergence of cyfluence risks—hybrid threats that combine system intrusion with targeted narrative manipulation. As municipal infrastructure increasingly depends on IoT devices, real-time data streams, cloud-based applications, and automated urban management systems, disruptions can cascade across networks, while manipulated information circulating through public apps, digital signage, transport interfaces, and social media can amplify societal impact. Smart cities thus face a dual risk landscape in which breaches of technical systems and distortions of the information ecosystem can interact, accelerate one another, and undermine public trust at scale.

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CRC Spotlight_Smart Cities_ Future Urban Environments in the Crosshairs of Cyber Threats a.

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