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Today’s topics include an Ericsson study predicting that 5G service will cover 40% of the world’s population by 2024, and web conferencing service Zoom patching a critical flaw.
In its 2018 Mobility Report, communications technology vendor Ericsson predicts that by 2024, about 40 percent of the world’s population will be covered by 5G cellular networks, and 1.5 billion mobile users will have subscriptions with 5G services. The average expected monthly data usage of 21GB per user is predicted to grow about four times the amount of data expected to be consumed by the average user per month in 2018.
According to Patrik Cerwall, the head of Ericsson’s strategic marketing and the author of the report, as the start of 5G capabilities approaches in 2020, there’s actually been a spike in usage and traffic on existing 4G LTE networks that hasn’t been seen in the past.
Much of that increased usage was from China, and indicates the need for more powerful 5G networks with greater capacity and performance for users across the globe.
Cyber-security firm Tenable disclosed on Nov. 29 a high-impact vulnerability in the Zoom web video conferencing platform, which has up to 750,000 global users, that could have potentially enabled an attacker to hijack controls.
According to Tenable, the vulnerability is an unauthorized command execution issue that could be used to remotely bypass screen control permissions and send remote keystrokes to a system sharing the same screen. This could allow an attacker to impersonate meeting attendees, bypass screen control messages and control a victim’s desktop. It could also give an attacker the ability to kick attendees out of meetings.
Tenable reported the issue on Oct. 11, which Zoom patched in its Nov. 20 update.