5G OT Security Summit Speakers on Secure Frameworks for Regional Infrastructure
At a time when ASEAN nations are accelerating 5G deployments, cybersecurity leaders at the 5G and OT Security Summit in Malaysia issued a sobering warning: Fragmented regulations and uneven OT readiness threaten to undermine the region’s digital ambitions.
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While Malaysia and Singapore are updating national telecom security requirements, other ASEAN members are still in early stages. Many practitioners at the summit cautioned that digital sovereignty cannot be achieved through fragmented or piecemeal compliance. ASEAN nations, in particular, need unified, regionally aligned cybersecurity frameworks to proactively mitigate vulnerabilities before they escalate into systemic risks.
Building cyber resilience in 5G networks also requires trust through transparency, including third-party assurance, vendor-provided security test results and comprehensive asset tagging for IoT and operational technology devices. Much of the focus today is on risks posed by insecure endpoints connected to otherwise resilient telecom backbones.
“We have hardened the network but are connecting it to millions of untrusted IoT devices,” said Erik Kvarvag, chief security architect at Telenor Asia.
Experts stressed that OT environments require a fundamentally different approach, one that prioritizes safety and availability over traditional IT confidentiality goals. Drawing from global best practices, organizations need holistic, risk-based security architectures tailored to the latency-sensitive and safety-critical nature of OT operations – where latency is not just a performance metric but also a matter of life and death. Downtime can lead to safety incidents, reputational damage and national security breaches.
“We have seen what happens when availability is disrupted in water utilities or energy grids,” said Jake Braun, CEO of Cambridge Global Advisors. He urged ASEAN nations to prioritize water infrastructure as a critical attack surface, citing recent intrusions attributed to state-sponsored actors.
The telecom sector should take a layered approach to security. Enterprise networks, production infrastructure, services and customer-facing platforms must be secured with end-to-end visibility and continuous monitoring, Deloitte Partner Anand R Prasad said. “Too often, organizations treat each in isolation,” he said. “But the iceberg melts from the bottom. What you don’t see is what will sink you.”
One of the most persistent challenges facing OT security teams is patching. Many legacy systems in critical infrastructure are either at end-of-life or too sensitive to withstand regular software updates. Summit attendees emphasized the need to implement compensating controls, including whitelisting, network segmentation, use of a simulation environment, to test updates safely – and working closely with vendors to ensure patch compatibility.
These defenses are essential to maintaining resilience in complex, high-stakes OT ecosystems where system downtime is not an option. Throughout the day, speakers called for aligning cybersecurity practices with operational realities.
“You can’t fix one hole in a dam and call it secure,” Deloitte’s Prasad said. “You must understand how the entire system works or risk the whole thing collapsing.”