Cybersecurity of data communication networks: A comprehensive survey of threats, challenges, technical solutions, and future research directions

As global systems become increasingly digitalized and AI-driven, cybersecurity has emerged as a critical concern across multiple domains. This survey provides a structured review of cybersecurity threats, challenges, technical solutions, and future research directions in data communication networks. To ensure analytical depth, the reviewed literature is organized through a four-dimensional taxonomy that systematically covers major attack classes, mitigation challenges, defense mechanisms, and emerging research areas. The paper examines a broad range of adversarial vectors, including malware, advanced persistent threats (APTs), DNS attacks, social engineering, web application attacks, network attacks, routing attacks, and software supply-chain vulnerabilities. Beyond purely technical threats, the survey discusses the role of human factors, attacker motivations, socio-technical impacts, and practical mitigation challenges. It also reviews technical solutions such as network security measures, endpoint protection, authentication and access control, threat monitoring, Zero Trust approaches, software supply-chain security, and cloud-native protection architectures. Utilizing the SolarWinds incident as a case study, the paper illustrates how modern multi-stage attacks can bypass conventional defenses. The paper concludes by outlining future research directions in AI/ML-based cybersecurity, IoT security, cloud security, and privacy-preserving protection.