Telecom Industry Cybersecurity Solutions for Network and Data Protection

The telecommunications sector provides communications, information, media, content, and entertainment services to homes and businesses. For telecom providers, cyber security is of strategic importance because of their large and frequently expanding attack surface with millions of endpoints, nodes and a very wide variety of servers and databases. Growth through frequent acquisition amplifies telecom cyber security challenges.

The combination of a wide attack surface and an innate intolerance for service disruption makes telecoms an attractive target for financially motivated threat actors. Telecoms face an increasing range of cyber threats that includes ransomware, phishing and credential harvesting, exploitation of network software vulnerabilities, man-in-the-middle attacks, data exfiltration, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

NATION-STATE ATTACKERS

Due to the central role of the services that telecoms provide, and the sensitive data they manage, hostile nation-state threat-actors frequently try to disrupt their operations or gather intelligence. Nation-state threat-actors operate on a larger scale, and deploy different and highly advanced tactics, techniques, procedures, and methodologies usually stealthily over a much longer time horizon.

TELECOM CYBER SECURITY CHALLENGES

Securing Software-driven, Cloud-based Networks

To stay competitive and profitable, telecoms seek to maximize agility while minimizing OPEX and CAPEX. They are moving as much network functionality as possible from hardware to disaggregated, software-based, and applications that run on standard networking white boxes. Communications software developers typically leverage containers and Kubernetes to enable automation of network deployment and scaling. 5G networks, with their distributed cloud-native architectures, are a prime example of this evolution. As the telecommunications sector moves to software-driven platforms in both the network core and edge, threat-actors have a wider range of entry points and systems they can impact. Disaggregated networks also rely on a broader software supply chain. Telecom cyber security teams need to ensure that this rapidly evolving attack surface is robustly protected.

Securing Sensitive Data

Telecoms hold a range of sensitive data including personally identifiable information (PII), customer contact information, call and billing data, and device details. Telecoms also hold valuable customer location details, demographic data, and information about subscriber online activity and service consumption. To prevent exfiltration and corruption of this highly sensitive data, telecoms need to both prioritize proactive cyber security measures to prevent breaches and enhance their ability to rapidly detect and eradicate attackers that evade defenses.

Securing Legacy Systems

Telecoms typically upgrade infrastructure gradually due to the large scale and high cost of network hardware and software. They typically continue to operate legacy equipment and databases, including end-of-life equipment that can be very difficult to secure against the latest threats. Telecom cyber security teams need to implement compensating controls that include isolation of legacy systems, disabling unnecessary services they provide, MFA, and adoption of zero trust models. Incident response plans and backup and recovery plans are critical.

Early Threat Detection & Rapid Response

In addition to protecting sensitive customer data, telecoms are expected to provide 24×7 service. To enable a swift and decisive response to any security breach, telecoms must have a robust 24/7/365 threat detection and response capability.

ADDRESSING TELECOM CYBER SECURITY CHALLENGES

Challenge

Securing cloud operations and migrations

Securing sensitive data

Early threat detection and rapid response to an attack

Sygnia cybersecurity solution

Cloud Security Services

Incident Response Retainer

SYGNIA HELPS TELECOMS CONTAIN AND ERADICATE ADVANCED THREAT-ACTORS

Sygnia has telecoms contain and eradicate complex and persistent attacks, including ransomware and multi-year espionage launched by a variety of private and nation-state threat actors. Our teams are intimately familiar with the complexities of telecom infrastructure, how threat-actors leverage it, what it takes to eradicate attackers and prevent return attacks. Sygnia’s advanced forensic analysis has uncovered a number of multi-year, clandestine espionage campaigns directed against telecoms that were quickly neutralized by Sygnia’s incident response teams.

Sygnia has helped telcos contain and eradicate complex attacks including ransomware, and multi-year clandestine espionage.

Enhancing Cyber Resilience

Sygnia provides a variety of telecom cybersecurity solutions to enhance cyber resilience and defeat attackers. Our cybersecurity solutions include posture enhancement, M&A assessment, threat hunting, red teaming, purple teaming, incident response retainer, crisis preparedness, MDR and table-top wargames. Sygnia MDR provides telecoms with an additional layer of 24×7 threat monitoring, accelerated threat detection and response. Sygnia also helps telecoms secure their cloud migrations with a suite of cloud security services.

IT and Operational Networks

Sygnia’s services and expertise cover telcos IT and operational infrastructures. For example, Sygnia’s Red Team exercises include attacks launched on the telco’s IT infrastructure, OT infrastructure, and supply chain. Our other services follow the same comprehensive approach. End-to-end coverage of telco infrastructure is a key element of our success helping Telcos defeat advanced attackers and enhance cyber resilience.

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