Telecom Sector Security

The Telecom sector has witnessed huge growth especially in emerging economies of Asia, Africa and South America. This has resulted in rapid expansion of the network, addition of value-added services, and resultant increase in complexity of the entire setup. Often, security can get overlooked or kept on the backburner in the rush to increase market share and reduce costs. However, cyber-criminals don’t care for such economic realities, and they have begun to increasingly target telecom infrastructure, especially as it becomes IP-based with the arrival of LTE.



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.



Telecom 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

Vendor apathy

Lack of good testing tools

Lack of security know-how

Absence of proper testing setup

Absence of proper monitoring

Supply chain risks

LTE Equipment security testing

GSM Internet Data Access Pen-testing

GPRS Internet Data Pen-testing

SMS Spoofing and POC

Lawful Interception System/Gateway Security Audits

IVR Security Testing

Telecom SAP Implementation Security Assessment

X.25 Security Audit

SS7 Gateways & Process Security Review

Telcoc face the following security challenges:At NII, we offer our Telecom Security Assessment services in the following domains:Some of the telecom companies we have worked with already, include Vodafone, Saudi Telecom, Bahrain Telecom, Mobin Net (Iran), Tulip Telecom, and many others.We suggest recommended controls and techniques for mitigating identified security threats.Through our quality security test reports, which provide clarity to top management and help prioritize actions for the security teamin taking the recommended steps for threat aversion and risk mitigation.Further, we can work with your IT and network teams to help implement security solutions such as Cyber-Ark, SIEM, Web Application Firewalls, and others to address specific security challenges.Contact us to know more how we can help enhance the security posture of your telecom infrastructure.