The next generation of cellular technology is expected to revolutionise the way we communicate, with its increased bandwidth and lower latency expected to facilitate emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles. "5G is really the first time that you're going to see the next industrial revolution that results directly from a new communications infrastructure," said Ferguson, speaking at Cyber Security Nordic, an information security conference in Helsinki, Finland. But for all the benefits it has been touted to bring, the proliferation of connected devices will cause headaches among security professionals in the "not too distant future", he warned. While autonomous digital weapons and deepfakes are "emotionally frightening", these problems are much further down the line and will be at a much smaller scale compared to the threats that will arise in a hyperconnected 5G world, he said. Previous generations of cellular technology have created fresh cybersecurity challenges.

A study by Trend Micro researchers showed that more than 83 percent of all downloaded software files are unknown or unclassified, even two years after they were first observed in the wild. And because most malware threats come from software download events, they subsequently developed a human-readable machine learning system that successfully classifies unknown files into either benign or malicious in nature. The study involved a dataset of 3 million anonymized web-based software download events gathered in a seven-month period. These events were studied and analyzed using multiple sources of ground truth both from internal and proprietary Trend Micro systems and publicly available ones. However, less than 17 percent of the dataset were labeled using traditional means.