Securing the future of mobility

How can automotive innovations be made secure?

In our report we envision four co-existing future states of mobility; some quite similar to today’s landscape and others that posit more ambitious vehicle sharing and autonomous driving possibilities. The risks of these innovations that promptly come to mind, such as hacked autonomous vehicles crashing, only begin to scratch the surface; indeed, they may not even represent the most likely or high-impact threats. 

Shared vehicles could hold data from hundreds of unique users, making them a ripe target for digital thieves. Connected and increasingly autonomous vehicles may provide new opportunities for malicious ransomware. Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications can be compromised leading to safety issues for drivers and other road users. And as mobility managers take the hassle out of travel by managing end-to-end trip planning, they could gain an increasingly holistic view of people’s lives, including where they go, when, and for what purpose, accumulating data and raising the stakes even further.

The path forward should incorporate a comprehensive approach to cyber security that makes connected vehicles and the associated ecosystems secure, vigilant, and resilient. This likely involves a radical change to how organisations address cyber security:

• Secure: Establish risk-focused controls around the most sensitive assets, balancing the need to reduce risk, while also enabling productivity, business growth, and cost optimisation.
• Vigilant: Develop monitoring solutions focused on critical vehicle and business processes. By integrating threat data, IT data, and business data, organisations can equip themselves with context-rich alerts to help prioritise incident handling and streamline incident investigation.
• Resilient: Rapidly adapt and respond to internal or external changes - opportunities, demands, disruptions, or threats - and continue operations with limited impact to the business.

Cyber risk poses perhaps the greatest threat to the future of mobility, and data governance, privacy, and protection will likely be of paramount importance as individuals and organisations move to make it a reality. Securing the new mobility ecosystem is a daunting challenge, and the stakes are high. Read our report to learn more about how to address the cyber risks posed by the future of mobility.