Hit back on latest cyberthreats

Cyber breaches are never far from the news and, as Nokia releases its latest Threat Intelligence Report, Kal De, SVP of Product and Engineering for Cloud and Network Services at Nokia, talks to the Network Effect about the current threat landscape and what businesses should focus on right now. 

When Hollywood dramatizes cyber threats, it’s all frozen laptops and hacked emails. The real danger is far greater. In today’s hyper-connected world, a single breach in a telecom network doesn’t just disrupt calls, it can shut down banks, cripple healthcare, and even cripple emergency services.

Nokia’s Kal De argues that the stakes have never been higher. “When telecom networks are breached, it's not just calls that are affected,” he tells The Network Effect Podcast. “The service outages and data leaks can be extraordinarily disruptive across industries, banking, emergency response, business operations. It can affect millions of users.” Recent incidents prove this isn’t theoretical: attacks on major telecom providers have disrupted essential services in Europe, while in the U.S., breaches exposed lawful interception systems and sensitive metadata, raising serious national security concerns.

The lesson? Fragility lies in poorly maintained networks. “It starts with recognizing that a single breach, a single software failure, can have a massive blast radius. The effects can be national in scale, or indeed global.”

Artificial intelligence is amplifying the threat. De calls today’s attackers “professional grade”, organized, patient, and increasingly automated. AI-powered phishing campaigns evolve in real time, while distributed denial-of-service attacks can overwhelm networks in minutes. But AI is also our best defense. It helps security teams detect subtle anomalies, automate responses, and shorten the time it takes to isolate breaches.

The path forward, he insists, is preparation. “A concerted investment in security resilience across every part of the network” is the cornerstone of continuity. The future of telecom security won’t be determined by whether threats exist, they always will, but by how effectively industries collaborate, innovate responsibly, and build resilience into every layer of the digital economy.