5G Networks Susceptible to Lateral Attacks: NSA/CISA

The NSA and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommended ways to prevent a malicious 5G cyberattack from compromising an entire network. Three more white papers are to come. “After the initial compromise of a network, attackers commonly pivot laterally by exploiting the availability of internal services, particularly looking for services that are unauthenticated,” Thursday's report said: “An attacker might use an initial position on a compromised virtual machine (VM) or container to access an application programming interface (API) or service endpoint that is not exposed externally. 5G cloud deployments will introduce more opportunities to move laterally.” Networks should assign unique, authenticated identities to all elements that communicate with other elements, the paper urged. Credential management is important, said NSA and CISA, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. “Analytics for detecting potentially malicious resource access attempts should be deployed and run regularly,” they said: 5G cloud software should be kept “up-to-date and free from known vulnerabilities.”