After years of stalled progress, China’s Embedded Subscriber Identity Module (eSIM) market is beginning to stir like a waking dragon.

5G Standalone (SA) networks offer significant connectivity upgrades from 4G and other legacy standards. Notably, private 5G enables enterprises to support mission- and safety-critical applications, such as industrial robotics or remote surgeries. Although 5G SA networks make significant improvements to security compared to previous mobile generations, malicious actors continue to evolve their tactics. For 5G Non-Standalone (NSA) networks, a hybridized model creates a security landscape with significant complexity, with cross-correlation of threat indicators critical to tackling attacks.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is most commonly used for contactless payments, as evidenced by recent survey results from ABI Research and the NFC Forum. This close proximity-based technology allows consumers to conveniently tap-and-pay for goods and services via a smartphone or smartwatch. While contactless payments will remain the biggest opportunity for NFC, new use cases are emerging. Between the NFC Forum’s Technical Roadmap and recent advancements in embedded Secure Element (eSE) technology, NFC applications are expanding to broader industries. Here are five other ways NFC can be used.

If a major telecommunications network is hacked, millions of customers’ connections will be abruptly disrupted, causing widespread societal panic and economic loss. And as illustrated by the recent attack on Verizon and AT&T by Chinese hackers, telco breaches can impact national security posture, too.

Signaling was a major security vulnerability for legacy cellular generations (2G, 3G, and 4G), opening the gate to signaling storms, SS7 and Diameter-based exploitation, spam, and fraud. While it’s easy to assume 5G networks would be immune to such cyberattacks, this isn’t the case. Many 5G deployments are hybrid (also using legacy connectivity) and are Non-Standalone (NSA), making it essential that signaling continues to be a core focus of telco security solutions. Even for 5G Standalone (SA) networks, threat actors will adapt and leverage more elaborate schemes.