What are the threat vectors affecting a telecom enterprise?

TME companies has always been on the radar of cyber attackers as these multinational companies build, control, and operate with extremely critical infrastructure, the failure of which could bring a nation to a standstill. With the advent of 5G, IoT, and OTT, these firms have access to extremely large and sensitive data stores which imposes a heightened obligation of having a secure ecosystem in place. Not securing their infrastructure and content delivery vehicle could prove to be a disaster as witnessed during hacks on multiple TME enterprises before.

The threat landscape and cybersecurity challenges for the TME industry:

• Data Privacy and User Data Management
  • Customer and subscriber data protections
  • Intellectual property right threats
  • Third-party identity and access management
• Securing 5G Networks
  • Trust and identity management between users, networks, and vertical services
  • Secure infrastructure for new age technologies like SDN/NFV, and small cell, among others
• Content Security
  • Securing creation, storage, and transfer of content
  • Digital rights management and piracy protection
• Securing Smart cities and the IoT ecosystem
  • Securing the device ecosystem- short-range communication networks (LoraWAN, NBIoT, and Wifi, among others) and sensors
  • Physical and endpoint security- Securing physical environment, command centers, data centers, and the cloud
• Regulatory and Compliance
  • Managing security compliance for new services in the TME industry like security breach notification laws, the federal Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and associated anti-money laundering (AML) for casino businesses
  • M&A compliances
• Ransomware Attacks
  • The TME industry is very prone to ransomware attacks through DDoS (distributed denial-of-services) and PDoS (permanent denial-of-services)