• Telcos are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals 
• Are network operators doing enough to protect themselves?
• We asked our DSP Leaders Council members this question as part of a recent survey and discussed the results during a recent panel discussion 

Telecom operators are coming under fire from cybercriminals more than ever, it seems, with the number of high-profile data breach cases growing each quarter. Is this because telcos are perceived to be an easy target with a lot of valuable data that can be easily accessed by bad actors? Which, in turn, begs the question – have telcos done enough to protect themselves and their customers from cybercriminals?

We posed this question in our recent survey of TelecomTV’s DSP Leaders Council, a 100-plus strong body of industry leaders comprising senior executives from network operators, cloud service providers, technology developers and the analyst community. The results of the survey, which was conducted during January 2026, have been published in the free-to-download 2026 version of the DSP Leaders Industry Vision Report.

Specifically, we asked: Has the telco sector failed to invest enough in terms of financial, human and technical resources into network security over the past few years?

As you can see from the chart above, there’s no clear consensus but there does appear to be growing concern. 

Almost half of our respondents (48%) believe network operators should have invested more and done more to protect their customers and their own assets over the past few years – that’s up from the 40% that voted for this option in the 2025 survey. 

Meanwhile, the proportion of survey respondents who believe the telcos have invested as much as they could and should have done decreased from 50% in 2025 to just 38% this year. That’s a telling change. 

These results were discussed during a recent panel discussion held on the show floor at MWC26 in Barcelona, where Darrell Jordan-Smith, chief revenue officer at Wind River, Terje Jensen, head of global business security at Telenor, Geoff Hollingworth, CMO at Rakuten Symphony, and Neil McRae, CTIO at CityFibre, joined us to discuss some of the key takeaways from the report. 

Jensen had some interesting insights, noting it isn’t always that easy for network operators to deal with every possible avenue of attack and that the bad actors are getting smarter.  

“Clearly there have been cases in the past couple of years showing that not everyone has put enough effort or competency or skills into this,” stated the telenor exec. “There have been successful attacks and major payouts... But also there’s a recognition that telcos are sitting on a huge [volume of] valuable data… What we have seen across the board is that the attackers are also getting more advanced. They are going for the weakest link in many cases, and the weakest link might not be the telcos directly. It could be through the suppliers. So there are a number of ways into this. I think they’re getting more and more sophisticated,” he added, before noting that the human element – staff and contractors – are also increasingly targeted as ways to breach a telco. 

The panellists had varying views, with CityFibre’s McRae noting that there had been, in the past, some complacency in the telecom sector, and that was one of the factors in the UK that led to the Telecom Security Act, “which has driven a huge amount of effort across the UK market. And we see similar things happening in the US market, and I think we’re going to see this in Europe soon,” stated McRae. 

He added: “We haven’t done a good enough job of telling people what we are doing and how we’re doing it and how it affects them.” 

You can watch the panel discussion, which also looked at the topics of telco AI strategies and the business potential of digital sovereign services, here. 

And we previously published an article on the survey results related to sovereign services – see Sovereign services not a cash cow for all – report.

Many other topics, including the telecom sector’s growth prospects, satellite direct-to-device (D2D) service timelines, 6G readiness, ecosystem development, ‘fair share’ payments and the importance of various technical advances, are covered in the DSP Leaders Industry Vision Report.

For all of our free-to-download reports, check out TelecomTV’s reports section. 

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV