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What’s the greater risk to UK 5G, Huawei backdoors or DDoS?

by Dave Whitelegg on February 21, 2019

Have we been focusing too much on the Huawei backdoor threat instead of the DDoS threat facing the incoming 5G network infrastructure? Lee Chen, CEO at A10 networks thinks so.

The size and sophistication of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have risen at an ever-accelerating pace. As new 5G networks become operational, we expect the size of attacks will dwarf these records. This is primarily due to the increase in IoT devices that 5G will introduce, with the number set to reach 4.1 billion globally by 2024. Each device is a perfect nest for botnets carrying malware, offering a new DDoS weapon for hackers to take advantage of.

Service providers will need to evolve rapidly with these growing threats and adopt intelligent automation to detect and mitigate security anomalies in a matter of seconds. Sophisticated DDoS threat intelligence, combined with real-time threat detection and automated signature extraction, will allow the marketplace to defend against even the most massive multi-vector DDoS attacks, no matter where they originate.

The Huawei threat remains a political football, there is still uncertainty on whether the Chinese telecoms giant’s network devices will be banned in the UK or not. I have updated my post – Is Huawei a Threat to UK National Security? with the latest developments.