Telenor, Jazz, Nayatel and Wateen claim PTA cybersecurity honours, but none publishes a score
The awards rest on a yearly compliance audit under the Critical Telecom Data and Infrastructure Security Regulations. What a first place there shows, and what it cannot.
Four Pakistani operators have announced top honours from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority's cybersecurity week, and none has published the score behind its rank. Telenor Pakistan said on 29 October that it placed first in Cybersecurity Excellence for the third year running. JazzWorld said it ranked first in the Annual PTA CTDISR Audit 2025 to 2026, a result it called a joint top ranking, and won the Cybersecurity Awareness Campaign Best Video 2026. Nayatel reported first place in the fixed line category, and Wateen Telecom announced a Cybersecurity Excellence award at the closing ceremony of Cybersecurity Awareness Week 2026.
CTDISR is PTA's Critical Telecom Data and Infrastructure Security Regulations. PTA and an independent third party audit licensed operators against it every year, and each operator is ranked within its own category. The regulations were updated as CTDISR 2025 and align with the ISO/IEC 27001 and NIST Cybersecurity Framework standards. Shaza Fatima Khawaja, the IT and telecom minister, presented the awards under the theme "Building a Safe, Secure, and Resilient Cyberspace". Information minister Attaullah Tarar and PTA chairman Hafeezur Rehman were among those present.
“Cybersecurity is fundamental to building trust in a hyper connected society like ours.”
Who ranked where
Telenor said PTA's audit and revalidation gave it one of the highest compliance scores in the industry. Nayatel said it had held second place for two years before moving to first in 2024 to 2025, and kept the top spot in 2026. Zong placed second among cellular mobile operators in the 2025 awards, up from third in 2024.
“As Pakistan's digital economy grows, cybersecurity must remain central to how we build and deliver digital services.”
The magazine's reading
Telenor and Jazz each claim first place among mobile operators. Both can be true only if the two tied, which is what Jazz's phrase "joint top ranking" implies, so a first place says little without the number behind it. Nayatel's first is a different contest, because operators are ranked within category, and a fixed line rank cannot be set against a mobile one.
An audit against ISO/IEC 27001 style controls checks whether an operator runs a risk process, controls who has access, monitors its systems and handles incidents, and whether it can produce evidence of each. It does not test whether an attacker can get in. The NIST framework groups the work into identifying assets, protecting them, detecting problems, responding and recovering. A high score therefore shows that controls and records are in order, not that a breach is unlikely.
The yearly audit does give PTA a lever, and Pakistan reached Tier 1 in the ITU Global Cybersecurity Index 2024, which PTA partly credits to regular sector audits. Publishing each operator's score by category would let enterprise buyers and customers compare operators on one basis. Until PTA does, the honours are company announcements of a ranking, with the evidence held by the regulator.
