Regulation Can Work Against Making Networks More Secure: GSMA
Mobile carriers worldwide are spending up to $19 billion annually on “core cybersecurity activities,” and that is expected to increase to $42 billion by 2030, GSMA said in a report released Wednesday. Despite this investment, carriers face “poorly designed, misaligned or overly prescriptive regulation, which results in unnecessary costs, diverting resources from genuine risk mitigation, and in some cases increasing exposure to cyber threats,” GSMA added.
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It cited “fragmented and inconsistent regulation” as a major concern, “forcing operators to comply with overlapping or contradictory requirements from multiple agencies.” Providers also face a “proliferation of reporting obligations, sometimes requiring the same incident to be reported multiple times in different formats,” the report said. GSMA criticized “prescriptive ‘box-ticking’ rules that mandate tools or processes rather than focusing on real-world security outcomes.” One carrier reported that up to 80% of its cybersecurity operations team’s time “is spent on audits and compliance tasks, rather than threat detection or incident response.”