Visual and verbal communication are intrinsic to human nature. Throughout history, they have played a crucial role in survival, coordination, and knowledge sharing.
Modern telecommunications serve the same fundamental purpose, enabling humanity to function as a globally connected network.
Reliable communication services underpin the proper functioning of economic systems, emergency response, public health institutions, and national security organizations. Most critical sectors, including finance, transportation, and government, depend on stable connectivity.
So, what happens if telecom services fail following a critical breach?
A lot:
- Identity theft as scale, since people’s data could be stolen; as was the case in the 2026 Odido hack1.
- Severe economic damage, with the UK alone losing between $55–57 billion in revenue2 due to cyberattacks between 2020 and 2025.
- Life-threating public safety issues, with people unable to contact emergency services or first responders losing coordination capabilities.
Fortunately, such a large-scale attack has never happened; however, the risk is there. In the EU alone, telecom security incidents have seen a 20% increase in 2024, as opposed to 2023, according to ENISA (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity). The increase proves not only that attackers are trying to disrupt telecom services, but they are also getting more determined.
Telecom providers take this threat seriously, recognizing that the larger they are, the more damaging the impact of their failure would be.
Such an example is illustrated by our customer, a large-scale telecom provider with a global presence and an extended carrier network supporting millions of subscribers. They already have strong perimeter security and network protections in place.However, if an attacker did breach their infrastructure, there was no way to detect their movement inside the network.
This was a blind spot the customer couldn’t accept. To remove it, they deployed MetaDefender NDR, and leveraged its AI-driven threat detection and behavioral analytics capabilities into deeper network visibility for their SOC teams.
Here’s how the story unfolded.
Relying on Delayed Indicators to Detect Network Threats Led to Delayed Responses
The customer operated on a complex technology environment, which consisted of carrier-grade infrastructure, network operations systems, data centers, cloud services, and distributed telecom networks. The ecosystem generated enormous volumes of internal traffic, so traditional monitoring tools couldn't identify abnormal activity.
SOC teams didn’t have enough visibility into east-west communications across core network systems, data centers, and service platforms, forcing them to rely on delayed indicators such as endpoint alerts or abnormal system behavior to detect suspicious activity.
By the time these teams can even detect intrusions, the threat may have already spread laterally, moving from low-value areas to critical systems, enabling data exfiltration, service disruption, or full system takeover.
How OPSWAT MetaDefender NDR Title Solved Three Core Issues
Our customer deployed MetaDefender NDR across their network, leveraging it to identify and eliminate suspicious activities inside the traffic flow.
MetaDefender NDR
MetaDefender NDR analyzes network telemetry to uncover command-and-control actions usually tied to cyberattacks. It uses AI-assisted detection models and identifies abnormal traffic patterns and detects lateral movement between systems.
In short, MetaDefender NDR looks for signals which indicate attacker activity early in the attack lifecycle.
The entire deployment was aimed at three core vulnerabilities, fixing them in the process.
Solving the lack of network visibility
With new sensor deployed at critical network aggregation points, the SOC teams got a unified view of network activity, observing all communications between core network systems, subscriber services, cloud infrastructure, and external connections.
Eliminating delays in detection of attacker behaviour
Communication patterns usually harder to detect were now mad visible via behavioural analytics. Combined with integrated threat intelligence and AI-driven anomaly detection empowered the SOC team to unocver suspicious activity inside the network.
Supporting SOC investigations
Before, analysist had to correlate fragmented alerts across multiple systems. With MetaDefender NDR in place, SOC teams could quickly investigate suspicious activity, using a comprehensive network-level view of potential threats.
End-to-end Visibility, Faster Threat Detection, Better Incident Response, and Compliance Readiness
| Area of Impact | Measurable Outcome |
|---|---|
| Network visibility | Clear, end-to-end visibility into communications across networks. |
| Threat detection speed | Earlier detection of suspicious activity and lateral movement. |
| Investigation efficiency | Faster root cause analysis for SOC analysts. |
| Service protection | Stronger protection of telecom services and network infrastructure. |
| Incident response | Better coordination across security operations teams. |
| Compliance readiness | Aligning monitoring capabilities with industrial cybersecurity standards. |
Securing the Industry which Connects the Digital World
If communications fail and the world goes dark, a lot of dangerous things can happen in the shadows. Our customer did not want to take a chance and become the reason why said things happened.
Rather than mitigating exposure, the organization chose to empower its teams to detect suspicious activity early on, through clear, continuous visibility into network activity.
With MetaDefender NDR in place, SOC teams can now detect intrusions in real time and stop attacks before they impact operations or customers, while also reinvestigating incidents and reconstructing attack timeliness through threat hunting and forensics features.
If this story hit uncomfortably close to home, get in touch and see how MetaDefender NDR fits into your infrastructure.
