General

NCSC’s Active Cyber Defence programme helps organisations protect their services from cyber attacks, manage incidents and improve their underlying security.

The programme is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives and consists of several interventions or real services – each free at the point of use – that perform a particular security service.

NCSC noted that more than 2.7 million scams were removed from the internet in 2021, four times more than in 2020 thanks to one of the security tools.

The NCSC produces a range of guidance that supports organisations with their cyber security. During their annual cyber security conference, NCSC announced new partnerships and released new guidance.

Here are some of the highlights below

• New email security tool was launched to help organisations check their defences.

Email Security Check tool helps users identify where they can do more to prevent spoofing, protect privacy, and offer practical advice on staying secure. There is no signup or personal details required. It enables users to look up any email domain to check whether it has recommended security measures to protect email privacy and prevent cyber criminals from sending malicious emails.

• Putting staff welfare at the heart of incident response

New guidance for cyber attack victims focuses on the welfare of staff responding to (and affected by) the crisis. The guidance recommends ways to help managers put welfare at the forefront of their incident response processes, and bolsters their organisation’s resilience to a crisis.

• NCSC announce an exciting new partnership with Internet Service Providers.

Internet Service Providers are the companies that provide internet access. The new partnership will let NCSC share threat data with them so they can instantly block access to known fraudulent sites. This will help to increase the speed at which they share data and block scams.

• NCSC joins international cyber agency partners to release supply chain guidance.

The advice sets out practical steps to take for managed service providers and their customers to protect themselves.  

• NCSC updated their cloud security guidance. 

NCSC streamlined their guidance for staying secure when using the cloud to help organisations of all sizes benefit from this advice, as more organisations switch to cloud services.