Sultan Mahmood Malik, Chief Security Officer for Huawei Gulf North
Doha, Qatar: As global industry leaders convene on the sidelines of MWC Doha 2025, the accelerating convergence of 5G, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence continues to reshape the cybersecurity landscape for national infrastructures. With mobile networks now serving as critical pillars for digital economies, ensuring their resilience has become an urgent strategic priority for governments and operators worldwide.
In this exclusive interview—conducted during MWC Doha 2025—Sultan Mahmood Malik, Chief Security Officer for Huawei Gulf North, offers an in-depth look at the rising cyber threats facing the telecom sector, Huawei’s long-term security strategy, and the importance of national initiatives designed to strengthen mobile network protection in an era of AI-driven attacks.
1. Specially in the context of Mobile World Congress, what are the major security threats and challenges being faced by mobile networks—especially in the AI era?
Mobile networks today form the backbone of national digital economies. As we adopt 5G, cloud, and AI-driven services, mobile networks are considered critical national infrastructure—powering everything from transportation and finance to healthcare and government services. Because of this, the security of mobile networks is effectively the security of the nation.
We are now seeing cyberattacks increase at an unprecedented rate. Threat actors are becoming more sophisticated, leveraging automation, AI-generated attacks, and the exploitation of complex network architectures. Some of the major threats include multilayered distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which not only cause service degradation or interruptions but also serve as cover for sensitive data exfiltration and ransomware infiltration. In 2025 alone, we have seen numerous incidents across the world that caused devastating results for telcos and the surrounding economic ecosystem.
Given this landscape, securing mobile networks has never been more critical. It requires a deep, end-to-end, and forward-looking approach—especially as AI continues to evolve and reshape the threat environment.
2. As a leading ICT solution provider, what is Huawei’s approach to addressing these challenges—now and in the future?
Cybersecurity and privacy protection are the cornerstones of everything we do at Huawei, and they can never be outweighed by commercial interests. We firmly believe that cybersecurity should be systematically built into every solution by design, and should be verifiable through industry standards and best practices.
Over the past 30 years, we have operated in more than 170 countries and regions without major cybersecurity incidents. This track record has earned our customers’ trust by fully meeting their cybersecurity requirements. We have established a comprehensive end-to-end cybersecurity governance and assurance framework covering strategies, supply chain, R&D, products, and solutions.
Our investment underscores this commitment: Over the past decade, our total security R&D investment reached USD 8.6 billion, and each year, at least 5% of our R&D spending is dedicated to security. To put this into perspective, this means more than USD 1 billion in 2025 alone. We currently have more than 3,800 full-time cybersecurity professionals working in more than 180 state-of-the-art R&D facilities across the globe, all with a single objective: ensuring the security of our customers by making our products “secure by design,” evolving with emerging threats, and mitigating risks in a timely manner.
Crucially, our strategy involves using AI for defense. A prime example is Huawei Cloud, where we integrate AI and machine learning into our cloud security framework to automate threat intelligence, detection, and real-time response to evolving cyberattacks—ensuring our cloud remains resilient and our customers’ businesses remain protected.
Cybersecurity is a complex challenge that requires cooperation. It is a shared responsibility that involves regulators, operators, standards bodies, and technology providers. We are committed to working with all stakeholders to ensure end-to-end cybersecurity as we build a fully connected, intelligent world. This is why we actively participate in over 360 industry standards organizations and help shape global cybersecurity standards. We strongly support the adoption of open and verifiable security standards such as GSMA NESAS/3GPP SCAS for 5G security and the GSMA Mobile Security Knowledge Base.
Finally, adherence to national laws and regulations—especially concerning privacy protection—is essential. We ensure all our solutions comply with local data-protection requirements. Huawei recently published its Data Governance Whitepaper at Huawei Connect in Shanghai, which can serve as a valuable reference for organizations looking to strengthen data governance and data sovereignty.
3. Yesterday morning, we saw the National Cybersecurity Agency’s new initiative on securing mobile networks. What are Huawei’s thoughts on such initiatives?
This initiative by the National Cybersecurity Agency (NCSA) is extremely important and very timely. As mentioned earlier, mobile networks are critical national infrastructure, and protecting them is essential for the country’s economic growth and national resilience. The NCSA’s proactive action directly addresses many of the challenges facing operators during this critical period.
Their work Is rooted in deep technical understanding, awareness of evolving threats, and alignment with international standards and best practices. By combining strong policy direction with technical clarity, they are creating a secure and trusted environment that benefits the entire ecosystem—operators, enterprises, regulators, and ultimately, citizens.
This initiative has the potential to become a case study for the effective adoption of industry standards like GSMA NESAS/SCAS and the Mobile CKB, localized into highly relevant and practical national guidelines.
