Deutsche Telekom late Friday said it will avoid routing customers’ email traffic through US hosted infrastructure and will step up email security in the wake of the NSA PRISM spying scandal.
Spanish operator group Telefónica has launched a digital security company in a bid to drive innovation in security.
UK operator group Vodafone has struck a five-year deal with British defence firm BAE Systems. The two have penned a partnership to provide businesses with a range of advanced communications security products and services for smartphones and tablets. BAE Systems has also selected Vodafone as its preferred supplier of mobile communications worldwide, excluding the US.
Commerzbank has adopted a visual transaction signing tool from UK security firm Cronto for its online banking customers, designed to protect against Trojan malware.
The world’s major telecoms operators are seeing their business squeezed by new firms, many of which offer services that make use the operators’ networks, but bring little or no benefit to the operators themselves. In areas where networks once made most of their money, margins continue to shrink. In the face of this competition, telecoms firms need to move fast to reinvent themselves and grow their profits.
While the future may seem bleak, the established telecoms operators have two trump cards up their sleeves: saleable Big Data and customer trust. If they play them in the right way, they’ll help transform the companies back into the industry’s innovators.
Operators stand to lose between $1m to $2m over a one to three day period, as a result of fraudulent SMS campaigns, according to an ex-GCHQ official. Gareth Maclachlan, now COO at Adaptive Mobile, a firm he co-founded, said that cyber-criminals have been carrying out spam and phishing campaigns in the PC/fixed-line internet world for years, but are seeing even bigger opportunities by targeting mobile operators, due to the way the mobile ecosystem is set up.
Social site Twitter has acquired a small mobile security firm specialising in secure tools for Android. The purchase seems a strange fit but it has been suggested that the talent that comes with the company is what Twitter is really after.
A number of high-profile websites were hacked on Sunday by a Turkish hacking group TurkGuvenligi, who have described the 4th of September as ‘World Hackers Day’.
Taiwan has become the lastest market to voice concerns over the use of network equipment from Chinese vendor Huawei, with the regulator—the National Communications Commission—ruling that core network kit may not be cleared for use by Taiwanese operators because of national security worries. Huawei has met with similar objections recently in India and the US.
Former Vodafone UK CTO Chris Burke talks about the importance of employee monitoring within mobile operators as the quantity of sensitive customer data held by the operators increases exponentially.
Security vendor Gemalto has said that its LTE technology, dubbed Xi, has been selected by NTT DoComo for the Japanese carrier’s LTE roll-out.
Intel says the move will hellp it address the billions of internet-ready devices, including mobile and wireless devices, TVs, cars, medical devices and ATM machines as well as the accompanying surge in cyber threats. The chip giant said providing protection to a diverse online world requires a fundamentally new approach involving software, hardware and services.
Tuesday’s launch of the BlackBerry 6 OS, Research In Motion’s new flagship operating system and accompanying hero device – the Torch – was overshadowed by ongoing privacy concerns over the RIM network in the Middle East and India.
Security researchers on Wednesday suggested that the future encryption protocol deployed to protect 3G (UMTS/WCDMA) phone calls is as weak as the existing, and potentially flawed, system used for 2G telephony.
How mobile security needs to move on after the recent News of the World scandal.
At the Black Hat security conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, researchers claimed that smartphones including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android platform and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile were susceptible to SMS based attacks.
