5G technologies will broaden attack surfaces

The arrival of 5G, with significantly faster speeds, increased capacity and lower latency, will change existing operating environments. However, these benefits will come at the expense of an exponential growth of attack surfaces. The 5G-enabled devices and networks that underpin society will be compromised by new and traditional attacks, causing chaos and plunging business into disarray.

The impacts of attacks on 5G technologies and infrastructure will be felt across a range of industries who leverage 5G to become more operationally efficient or to automate and speed up processes. There will be countless opportunities to attack 5G infrastructure, including billions of previously unconnected IoT devices and new private networks. Millions of new 5G-enabled masts, built and operated by a plethora of companies and governments to varying levels of assurance, will have new vulnerabilities exposed and create new ingress points for attackers to exploit. The step change in available bandwidth will act as an accelerator to existing attacks and amplify new ones, stretching organizational resilience to its maximum.