How it works?

The Telecom sector has witnessed huge growth and has resulted in rapid expansion of the network, addition of value-added services, and resultant increase in complexity of the entire setup. In the process of expansion, often, security can get overlooked or kept on the backburner in the rush to increase market share and reduce costs. Due to the critical nature of the information collected by telecom service providers, this industry faces some of the most severe threats. With increasing enterprise mobility, cloud storage and movement towards smart cities individuals and business have started relying more on telecom networks making it highly important for telecom operators to adopt and implement and highly secure cyber strategy.

This combined with increasing regulations towards telecom security have created quite a challenge that telcos are seeking to address. Our experience with telcos have revealed that while there are a variety of security issues - some of these are solvable, while others will remain known risks till cost-feasible measures can be found to address them.

SECURITY THREATS

Major threats to Telecom Security usually fall into the following categories:

• Phone Fraud -Toll Fraud, Cramming, Telemarketing fraud, War dialing and so on
• Theft - Data theft, network abuse, illegal data interception, unauthorized data modification (in billing or routing based processes)
• Malware - Viruses, trojan horse
• Spam - Sending Spam messages via SMS, MMS
• Denial of Service attacks - Request flooding, DoS attacks against network infrastructure.
• Data leakage - Penetrating billing and CRM systems to extract customer data