Smart Networks, Smarter Threats: Securing Telecoms in the Age of AI and Critical Infrastructure

The world is navigating a powerful intersection of opportunity and risk. Telecommunications—always an important utility—has become the vital backbone of our digital economy. It supports everything from emergency response systems and banking to generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) and smart cities. But with this transformation comes heightened vulnerability. Cyber attackers are no longer targeting only data—they are aiming for the critical infrastructure that keeps societies connected.

A Strategic Cyber Target—Telecommunications Sector

In the 1Q of 2025, the telecommunications sector experienced the highest percentage increase in weekly cyberattacks, with a 94% jump, reaching 2,664 attacks per organisation weekly according to Check Point Research, with the expectation for this to rise.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025 report also acknowledged that from large-scale state-sponsored cyber espionage via telecommunications infrastructure to the targeting of satellites and undersea cables, geopolitical tensions continue to manifest through the increasing number of attacks on critical  infrastructure in the communications sector. Undersea cables are crucial for facilitating not just the flow of global data but also the corresponding economic exchange. Their strategic role makes them vulnerable to monitoring and disruption, especially with limited defense measures and rising geopolitical tensions. Incidents experienced in the Baltic Sea after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war highlight the urgent need to protect these critical pieces of infrastructure.

This continued rise in cyberattacks on this critical infrastructure are driven by a few factors:

• Growing reliance on digital infrastructure such as 5G deployments have massively expanded the digital attack surface, especially through edge computing nodes.
• Telecoms are increasingly integrating AI and automation, creating new vulnerabilities in service delivery, data flow, and customer interactions.
• State-sponsored actors now view telecom infrastructure as a soft entry point to disrupt national economies, gather intelligence, or sow chaos, making this critical infrastructure a prime target for cyber criminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities.

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) classified telecom as a top-priority critical infrastructure sector in its Threat Landscape Report 2024, a trend now echoed in over 85 countries globally.

Without (Tele)Communications, A Quiet Place

The potential impact of a compromised telecom system extends far beyond just inconvenience. Cyberattacks on the telecommunications can paralyse national services, derail emergency responses, and cripple financial operations, besides just halting the ability for citizens to contact one another.

Societal chaos was evident a few years ago, when severe outages for one of Denmark’s largest mobile networks caused disruption for emergency services, with at least one hospital forced to reduce non-critical care, while also impacting first responders and cross-border operations. In India, a BEC (business email compromise) attack on a telco vendor led to the leakage of over 12 million mobile subscriber records, including geolocation, which were later exploited in targeted phishing campaigns.

These are more than just isolated incidents, they can be seen as early warnings. As countries digitise critical infrastructure and societies become reliant on digital services, telecom outages caused by cyberattacks can lead to national economic disruption, erosion of public trust, and at worst, in extreme cases, to loss of life.

The AI Factor: Double-Edged Sword for Telcos

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising telecom operations (and critical infrastructure in general). The IBM Institute for Business Value survey of 300 global telecom leaders revealed that most communications service providers are assessing and deploying gen AI use cases across multiple business areas. A 2024 study by NVIDIA found that nearly 90% of telecom companies use AI, with 48% in the piloting phase and 41% actively deploying AI. Most telecom service providers (53%) agree or strongly agree that adopting AI would provide a competitive advantage, according to the NVIDIA study.

Additionally, AI is also giving attackers unprecedented scale and precision. For example, with chatbots now handling a growing amount of telco customer interactions, these bots are now being targeted for prompt injection and social engineering.

In Hong Kong in 2024, a British multinational engineering firm was reportedly scammed out of USD $25 million (approximately HK$200 million) through a deepfake scam involving an employee in the Hong Kong office. This employee was tricked into transferring the funds to five local bank accounts via 15 transactions after receiving video conference calls from individuals posing as senior company officers.

Building Security into Every Layer of Critical Infrastructure

Whilst governments around the world have noticeably started to collaborate to ensure the critical infrastructure sector of telecommunications is receiving greater attention for security, it is clear more needs to be done. However, regulatory frameworks like the EU’s NIS2 Directive and the U.S. FCC Cybersecurity Labeling Program, which is volutntary, are beginning to push telcos to adopt secure-by-design approaches.

For example, The NIS2 Directive mandates that telecommunications providers adopt a security posture commensurate with the sophisticated external threats they encounter, particularly those posed by foreign actors. This entails implementing robust risk management practices, continuous monitoring, and rapid response mechanisms to detect and mitigate cyber threats effectively. The directive emphasises the necessity for telecom operators to assess and enhance their cyber security measures, ensuring resilience against potential nation-state attacks and other external adversaries. The U.S. FCC’s voluntary cyber security labeling program, specifically the Cyber Trust Mark, aims to incentivise manufacturers of internet of things (IoT) devices, including those used in telecommunications, to adopt security-by-design practices. This program encourages telcos to integrate security measures throughout the product development lifecycle, rather than adding them as an afterthought.

In the Asia–Pacific region, countries such as Japan and Singapore are strengthening their cyber laws, with Japan’s Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI) and Singapore’s Cybersecurity Act reinforcing compliance for critical infrastructure operators..

But to combat evolving threats, telecom providers (and critical infrastructure stakeholders) must go beyond compliance and adopt cyber security as a core strategic function. That includes:

1. AI red teaming. Simulating attacks on AI-based systems to identify weaknesses before adversaries do.
2. Voice biometrics and real-time analysis. To detect AI deepfake audio or spoofed communications.
3. Advanced threat prevention. Harnessing AI-driven solutions such as Check Point GenAI Protect, AI Cloud Protect, and ThreatCloud AIto enable real-time prevention across all environments—including on-premises, DevSecOps, cloud, applications, and workspaces. In addition, continuous threat exposure and risk assessment analysis is integral to achieving a fully automated and adaptive threat prevention strategy.

In regions like Southeast Asia, some telcos have already partnered with Check Point to implement cloud-native threat detection and secure SD-WAN policies across their 5G rollout zones. In one case, incident response times were reduced by 30% within six months, drastically improving business continuity.

Resilience Is the New Bandwidth

As the world races toward full digital transformation, telecom networks are the threads weaving everything together. But smart, connected systems can also collapse at scale if not adequately protected. In 2025 and beyond, we must treat cybersecurity in telecom (and in critical infrastructure in general as well) not as an IT line item, but as a pillar of national and global security.

Telecommunication is the circulatory system of our digital world. But as AI accelerates and cyber adversaries become more sophisticated, the risk of systemic failure grows. The future of telecom resilience depends on whether we can secure what we innovate—and whether our defences evolve faster than the threats we face.