Experts: iPad Mini Sales to Bring More Security Challenges for Mobile Network Operators

What do Amazons Kindle Fire HD, Samsung Galaxy S III, Google’s Nexus 7 tablet and the brand new iPad Mini have in common? They’re all highly popular and experts believe that millions of units will be purchased around Christmas time.

However, this also means that mobile network operators will have to adapt their systems to make sure they can cope with millions of new endpoints that will appear almost simultaneously.

The large number of new endpoints brings not only the risk of network congestions, but also scalability challenges and security risks.

In a recent interview we’ve had with Peter Doggart, senior director of global marketing at Crossbeam Systems – a company that offers mobile network operators comprehensive security solutions – the expert has explained that it’s not an easy task to address these issues.

“Network Operators must respond to a myriad of conflicting requirements: escalating mobile data traffic from iPads and all mobile devices, along with increasing user demands for faster network response times, internal pressures to control capital expenditures, and increasingly sophisticated security threats,” Doggart said.

“It’s a delicate dance to satisfy all these requirements. The result is that network operators could be exposed with inadequate capacity for the anticipated mobile data traffic or insufficient security to fully protect endpoints and the network from morphing security threats. And when actual needs turn out to be higher than anticipated needs, the impact can be very significant.”

According to the expert, in the past it wasn’t an easy task to secure an ever-growing network. However, now that more sophisticated solutions have been made available, the goal can be accomplished without much difficulty.

On the other hand, Doggart warns that if companies don’t take the necessary precautions, a lot of bad things can happen, including fraudulent access to the operators’ networks, which compromises corporate resources and even customer traffic.

“There are a broad number of attack schemes including intercepting SMS messages, intercepting warning notifications from the operators to customers about unusual activity, and stealing of data from mobile data traffic and customer’s devices,” he said.

“With the escalating number of attack vectors and the increasing frequency of attacks, operators’ revenue is impacted, including by the inflated need to build even more capacity into their networks just to handle traffic generated by this fraudulent traffic.”