How to navigate cybersecurity in a 5G world

With 5G comes a larger attack surface and more devices accessing the network. Companies must ramp up security strategies to stay protected, AT&T report finds.

AT&T released a report on Monday identifying the major security gaps organizations must address with the rise of 5G networking. 

While 72.5% of security professionals worldwide rated their level of concern for the 5G’s impact on security as high or medium-high, only 22% said they believed their current policies are ready for 5G, the report found. 

The AT&T Cybersecurity Insights Report: Security at the Speed of 5G surveyed 704 security practitioners from North America, India, Australia, and the UK to determine how prepared larger organizations are for the security implications of 5G.

5G promises increased bandwidth, higher speeds, with low latency, but it also brings an influx of cybersecurity concerns. The majority of respondents (76%) said they expected completely new security threats to surface from the 5G world, the report found. 

Nearly all respondents expect to make 5G-related security changes within the next five years, with 35% saying they will start in the next one to two years. Regardless of timeline, 78% of security professionals said their policies would need to be changed because of 5G, according to the report. 

To help professionals understand potential new threats, the report identified the following major security concerns surrounding 5G:

1. Larger attack surface due to the massive increase in connectivity (44%) 2. Greater number of devices accessing the network (39%) 3. The extension of security policies to new types of internet of things (IoT) devices (36%)  4. Authentication of a larger number and wider variety of devices (33%) 5. Insufficiency of perimeter defenses (27%)

While these concerns are legitimate, the report found bigger concerns exist surrounding the other technologies utilized in the deployment of 5G. 

The first technology is virtualization, which includes software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).