Cyber ​​Risk Management in Local Public Transport

An Alarm Bell That Cannot Be Ignored

The recent attack that disrupted the digital systems of several major European airports demonstrated how infrastructures once considered safe and advanced can be brought to their knees in a matter of hours. Disruptions were visible to everyone: manual check-ins, luggage piling up, passengers stranded. But behind those images lies a lesson that also applies to local transport, both public and private. If global hubs with significant resources and expertise can collapse under a cyberattack, how much more exposed are urban networks that are fragmented, often outdated, and lacking redundancy?

Subways, buses, trams, trains, and long-distance coaches are the backbone of collective mobility, both locally and nationally. When one of these systems fails, the consequences are not limited to efficiency losses: they directly affect people’s daily lives, urban economies, and even the functioning of entire regions. This is where the sector’s true criticality becomes clear: mobility is not just a service, it is a social and economic infrastructure that cannot afford interruptions.

A Digital and Hyperconnected Ecosystem

Urban and national mobility, as well as freight logistics networks, now rely on deeply digitalized infrastructures. Tickets are often dematerialized, payments are processed through contactless systems, vehicles constantly communicate with control centers through sensors and telemetry, while routes and shifts are planned by algorithms, often AI-driven. These are just some of the components showing how transport services are now fully based on digital processes.

This shift has made transport services more efficient and closer to citizens’ needs, but it has also multiplied points of access and corresponding vulnerabilities. In such complex and interconnected systems, the weakness of a single node can trigger cascading consequences across the entire infrastructure. If a metropolitan ticketing platform is hit by ransomware, turnstiles can shut down, causing a full-scale crisis. Similarly, an attack on a railway reservation system can paralyze nationwide travel, while a failure in a traffic management platform can create widespread delays across entire regions.

The Regulatory Framework: The Push from NIS2

The European NIS2 directive has made explicit what was already evident: mobility is critical infrastructure and must be protected as such. The directive has classified local public transport, rail networks, long-distance bus operators, sharing platforms, and logistics companies as essential or important entities, requiring them to adopt structured governance processes, continuous monitoring systems, and rapid incident notification procedures.

The scope of the directive is significant because it shifts responsibility from the technical domain to the managerial one. It is no longer sufficient to rely on an undersized IT department: security becomes a direct responsibility of the board. The fines for non-compliance are relevant, but the real risk is reputational. An attack that shuts down a capital city’s metro or disrupts the national railway ticketing system not only generates financial damage but also undermines public trust in a lasting way.

For many operators, especially local ones, this represents a major cultural shift. Yet NIS2 can also serve as a lever to reorganize processes and resources, pushing companies to integrate cybersecurity into daily governance and to consider it as part of the service’s value, not just an external obligation.

The Limits of Traditional Approaches

Despite regulatory pressure, cyber risk management in many organizations remains anchored in manual practices. Excel spreadsheets, departmental interviews, and static inventories create an illusion of control that does not reflect the complexity of modern systems. Manual tools and static inventories cannot represent infrastructures where IT, OT, and IoT merge into increasingly complex architectures, producing data flows and connections that constantly change and inevitably escape traditional control logics.

The real limitation is not only the slowness of updates but the absence of an integrated vision that links assets and processes. Without a model showing how different systems interact, it becomes impossible to assess the actual impact of a vulnerability. In urban transport, this results in immediate disruptions affecting thousands of users, while at the national level a neglected failure can paralyze railway lines or interregional bus routes. In both cases, the outcome is the same: the loss of public trust and the perception of an unreliable service.

A New Model: Towards Data-Driven Cyber Risk Management

The transport sector, both urban and national, can no longer rely on risk management methods designed for a static context. Sporadic inventories, manual data collection, or fragmented controls provide only a partial picture, incapable of reflecting the dynamics of systems in constant transformation. In such a scenario, static risk management cannot keep pace with the speed and propagation of threats.

This is why a data-driven approach is needed, turning infrastructure maps into digital models that replicate assets, processes, and relationships. Through such representation, it becomes possible to observe how an anomaly spreads, which nodes are affected, and which services risk being disrupted. These are not hypothetical scenarios but tools that allow decision-makers to anticipate the operational and economic consequences of an attack and to choose mitigation strategies with greater awareness.

For urban mobility managers, this means real-time monitoring of critical systems such as electronic ticketing, control centers, or mobility platforms, with the ability to intervene before a disruption escalates. For railway or coach operators, it means access to predictive models showing how a failure or attack could spread across lines and interregional nodes, generating a domino effect on the entire service.

The key lies not in the technology itself but in the ability to integrate security and risk management into daily operations. This shift redefines cybersecurity: no longer a purely technical function responding after the fact, but a structural component of transport governance, ensuring continuity even in crisis scenarios. For a sector built on reliability and regularity, this is the only way to strengthen public trust and turn regulatory compliance into true resilience.

Resilience as a Strategic Priority

Transport, both local and national, is the backbone of cities and territories. Its security can no longer be treated as secondary, but as a strategic priority involving governance, reputation, and economic continuity. Digital resilience must become the benchmark for service quality, ensuring compliance with regulations but above all guaranteeing the ability to keep people and goods moving.

The airport incident has shown how real the risk of critical infrastructure paralysis is. Urban and national transport cannot wait for the next crisis to act. The challenge is clear: integrate cybersecurity into service design and turn it into everyday resilience, the only way to ensure that subways, buses, trams, and trains continue to sustain the life of our communities.