Security has always mattered for mobile communications. But as threats and breaches grow more numerous and more complex, the stakes have never been higher. Communications service providers (CSPs) need to modernize their approach to security operations and planning so they can keep customers safe from increasingly innovative and mercenary cybercriminals.

Achieving that will require a threefold response: making full use of threat intelligence to identify and act on emerging security trends, building a stronger and more resilient 5G network, and ensuring individual devices are secure.

Make use of threat intelligence 

With cyberattacks becoming more sophisticated, security teams need faster access to threat intelligence that will help them stop attacks. By providing visibility into the latest threats, a modern threat intelligence platform can help organizations of all sizes understand recent attacker, malware and vulnerability trends. That visibility also accelerates responses by prioritizing the most urgent threats and allows security teams to hunt threat actors proactively.

Build a strong and resilient 5G network

Even if network components are configured initially with the right parameters and comply with security policies, changes will be needed as the network evolves. Leaving the initial parameters as they are will result in misconfigured security controls and, ultimately, network vulnerabilities that require automated audit and mitigation processes to neutralize.

Modern mobile networks include potentially thousands of data centers at the edge of the network, each hosting cloud-native virtual network functions — and operators can’t possibly track them all manually. Another potential risk factor lies in the failure to control and monitor how the network is being used. CSPs typically work on a “zero trust” basis, requiring all employees and contractors to be authorized, authenticated and validated before they can access the network. But even with the most stringent screening, when a threat does get in, it can go undetected for months without an appropriate security platform. 

Ensure device-level security 

In the information age, connectedness is our strength but also our weakness. By 2025, IoT connections are expected to reach 25 billion globally, so communication networks need to prepare for the equally exponential growth of associated security risks. How do you ensure the security of a network hosting billions of devices? How do you prevent hacktivist groups or state-backed actors from taking control of IoT devices that could attack the network? 

Those are some of the questions Nokia has been working to answer on behalf of CSPs.

How Nokia is helping tackle the challenges 

Nokia has developed powerful tools to address CSPs’ security issues and counter the growing threats of cyber attacks:

The Nokia Threat Intelligence Center examines the behavior of malware network communications to develop monitoring and detection rules that can identify malware infections — accurately and efficiently.

NetGuard Audit Compliance Manager automates the auditing and analysis of all the parameters in both physical and virtual networks, checking them against “gold standard” model versions. Configuration mismatches and anomalies are automatically flagged to help prevent service degradations and process inefficiencies.

NetGuard Cybersecurity Dome immediately spots and terminates suspicious user or entity sessions, improving security assurance by analyzing user and network behaviour — and then triggering remedial action as necessary.

Offering real-time network-based malware detection and analytics, NetGuard Endpoint Security spots infected endpoint devices and takes immediate action to notify or block malware and prevent security breaches.

Trust the experts

Nokia Security Consulting can help you transform your security operations and stay ahead of cybersecurity threats. We also offer cybersecurity products and services tailored for the wide range of security concerns facing modern communication networks. Learn more about we can help you identify threats more quickly, stop them automatically and take fast remediation actions when needed.