SK Telecom breach exposes urgent cybersecurity gaps in Asia’s telcos

The massive data leak highlights deep flaws in detection, data security, and executive oversight.

Asia’s telecom industry must overhaul its approach to cybersecurity, treating it as a strategic risk rather than an IT afterthought, analysts warned in the wake of the SK Telecom data breach that exposed nearly 27 million user records and sent the company’s shares tumbling over 5%.

Charles Li, CTO and Chief Analyst at Team T5, said the breach revealed how deeply attackers can embed themselves before detection. “Investigation shows they might have been infiltrated in early 2021 indicating a four year time of the attacker in their internet session.”

“The traditional pattern matching detection mechanism failed in protecting such targeted attacks, especially national sponsor attacks with determination and abundant resources. Instead, cyber defenders should seek Cyber Threat Intelligence backed threat hunting to be proactive, look for hidden risks or threats in their network environment.”

Li noted that the sector’s complex infrastructure creates major security gaps. “Telecom companies usually possess an interconnected network composed of heterogeneous systems, and many of them are legacy systems. The investigation also shows unpatched vulnerability and poor network segmentation are key issues for this incident, the nature of telecommunication networks make it a big challenge to defend advanced threat actors.”

He added that the stolen records had not been encrypted, so it was easily stolen by the actors.

Dr. Sharifah Roziah Bt Mohd Kassim, Senior Specialist at CyberSecurity Malaysia, underscored how basic controls remain missing. “[You] need to ensure that they encrypt all sensitive data, both in transit and also address this to reduce any exposure in case a compromise happens and the second one is that they need to have robust access control… and also implement zero trust models in the organisation.”

She also urged continuous monitoring and workforce training. “It would be good to embed AI driven threat monitoring… and of course, having a robust incident response plan… and having a security culture and also training.”

Both experts stressed that boards must lead the shift. Li said, “C-level executives should escalate cybersecurity as a strategic risk, but not just an IT department issue,” while Sharifah warned, “They have to make sure that customer trust is put as a very high priority… and of course, strategy investment in security.”