7 New Year’s Security Predictions from Top Vendors

Though 5G networks are just now coming online, 2020 is the year many experts believe they will begin revolutionizing online experiences. Sadly, predicts Dan Schiappa, chief product officer at Sophos, it’s also the year 5G will begin exposing businesses and consumers to a whole new class of extremely dangerous threats.

“5G will be the most fundamental game-changing technology to impact the cybersecurity landscape—maybe ever,” Schiappa says. “5G promises to connect almost all aspects of life through the network with game changing speed and lower latency, but it will also introduce significant security risks with new potential entry points that will expose organizations to new types of attack.”

Those entry points, he adds, include the same mobile devices users employ to access 5G networks. “5G devices come with built-in radios that don’t require communication with the corporate network anymore,” Schiappa says. “This makes it incredibly difficult to identify threats and compromised devices.”

WatchGuard agrees. “Your devices have intelligence built into them to automatically and silently switch between cellular and Wi-Fi,” the company writes. “Security researchers have exposed some flaws in this cellular-to-Wi-Fi handover process and it’s very likely that we will see a large 5G-to-Wi-Fi security vulnerability be exposed in 2020 that could allow attackers to access the voice and/or data of 5G mobile phones.”