LIVE FROM GSMA M360 MOBILE SECURITY AND INDUSTRIES, LONDON: Giorgio Migliarina, products and services director at Vodafone Business (pictured), claimed operators are uniquely placed to help companies across sectors deal with security threats given their wide scope, as he urged immediate action due to rising attacks.

Migliarina called for rapid action to address what he argued is a current failure of the European Union (EU) market, citing Vodafone research which shows around two-thirds of the 30 million companies operating in the bloc lack access to a cybersecurity expert and 7 million had no security systems in place to protect them.

With regards to users, Migliarina said only 65 per cent of ransomware victims got their data back, while 80 per cent of those who paid to have a data issue addressed would experience a repeat attack.

Summing up the current environment, Migliarina said in the few minutes he had been speaking during today’s keynote, around 50 companies in Europe would have been attacked, resulting in a cost exceeding £100,000.

With the migration to 5G, the rise of IoT and an increasing shift to remote working and cloud, Migliarina said the “attack surface is growing”.

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To that end, the Vodafone executive argued only operators had the experience, depth of understanding and breadth of insight to deal with three critical control points involving securing users, connections and operations.

“I think telcos are probably the only players in the ecosystem that have the visibility. We understand users, we have lot of data about users, we know connections and at the same time we have a lot of expertise in treating security ourselves as a large corporation. We have a role to play to ensure more and more companies are protected.”

Pointing to an example of some of the work already underway, he highlighted the Vodafone Identity Hub, an open-standard platform designed to help businesses protect users by using real-time data to stop fraud attacks.