Many organizations increasingly rely on 5G technologies for mobile communications, making any 5G security weaknesses of interest to attackers. The good news is that 5G standards have significantly improved cybersecurity for mobile communications overall. Even so, threat actors inevitably still target 5G devices, networks and services.
While mobile network operators are responsible for countering many of these threats through their own security controls, organizations that use 5G services should still consider how bad actors could use the technology against them. What follows are my top insights on 5G security threats for enterprise CISOs, based on a series of 5G cybersecurity white papers I co-authored for NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.
Top 5G security threats
Major 5G cybersecurity threats tend to fall into the following three categories: threats against 5G services and infrastructure, attacks against 5G devices and unavailability of 5G networks.
1. Threats against 5G services and infrastructure
Mobile network operators follow 5G standards in their implementations, but those standards do not require operators to implement or enforce all…
