Attacks on telecoms companies and internet service providers are on the rise. A report from the International Data Corporation says 37 per cent of telcos have been targeted by Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in the past year. Such attacks have led to 35 per cent of telecoms companies suffering from loss of business.
Research from Check Point shows that communications was the third most attacked sector in the last year, with the volume of attacks up 51 per cent from 2020.
The Optus data breach should be heeded as a warning for all telecoms companies and ISPs says Curtis Simpson, CISO at Armis. “For wireless operators, whose landscape is significantly evolving and has changed monumentally in recent years, protection involves having continuous visibility and insights into the behaviour of all assets,” Simpson says. “Of particular importance are unmanaged assets with the potential to disrupt critical operations and/or client services; this includes IoT devices, OT infrastructure, and cellular IoT.”
UK regulation on telco cybersecurity is coming
While Australia scrabbles to update its cybersecurity rules, the UK is implementing a new set of regulations for telecoms networks to ensure protection from just this sort of attack.
The Telecoms Security Act, which comes into force on 1 October, has been developed with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and telecoms regulator Ofcom, and sets out specific actions for UK public telecoms providers. These include taking into account supply chain risks and “protecting software and equipment which monitor and analyse networks and services”.
“We increasingly rely on our telecoms networks for our daily lives, our economy and the essential services we all use,” said the NCSC technical director Dr Ian Levy. “These new regulations will ensure that the security and resilience of those networks, and the equipment that underpins them, is appropriate for the future.”
