Authors - Roshna Dhakal, Khanista Namee Abstract - Modern railway system increasingly rely on digital technologies such as Communication-Based Train Control (CBTC), European Train Control System (ETCS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, raising significant cyber-security challenges. We have seen 220% increase in attacks over five years from opportunistic ransomware to sophisticated targeted threats. This paper provides an overview of railway cybersecurity and surveys the coverage area considering ICT architectures, cyber threat models, and AI-based defense approaches. 75% of cases employed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) tactics while ransomware had affected 54% of the OT environments. We describe a comparative taxonomy of Artificial Intelligence and Ma-chine Learning approaches including the methods based on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and advanced deep learning practices with detection accuracy as high as 97.46%. However, there exist several challenges: few available public data sets, lack of validation in real-world scenarios, demands for explain ability from that AI system and worries about adversarial robustness. We discuss eight potential research gaps, and future directions focusing on federated learning, digital twin development, multimodal AI fusion and safety-security co-engineering frameworks.
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