Early Warning is joining MyNCSC

Recap of Early Warning

Existing users will know that Early Warning is a threat-notification service that tells you about potentially suspicious activity on your network from a variety of open source, commercial and private data sources. It’s also an important element in the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) services from the NCSC.

What is changing?

We built the current customer portal to support a small number of users before Early Warning was officially launched at CYBERUK 2021. Since then, we’ve been really pleased to see the growing interest in the service and hear from users. We now manage over 8,000 subscribing organisations and we know from feedback how valuable the service is to its users, helping organisations spot suspicious activity early on and prevent incidents before they become a bigger threat.

Users have also told us they wanted an easier way to access ACD services, and so MyNCSC was launched to build a common point of entry to the ACD services. The first services to become part of this were Web Check and Mail Check and now Early Warning is joining too.

What are the benefits?

Moving Early Warning to MyNCSC is another step closer to having a single point of entry for all NCSC ACD services. This is a good thing because it will allow subscribing organisations to manage their users and register their assets with the NCSC in one place, reducing duplication and saving time. We hope it will also scale up Early Warning by encouraging more organisations to sign up, improving the data provided and making the service better for our customers.

How will it look?

The system will function in the same way but you should notice a significant improvement to the customer interface and the overall experience. Users will also be able to make use of new features, including:

• the ability to split an organisation into “teams” allowing more flexible organisation of users and assets
• a news centre showing important NCSC news, advice and guidance, and other publications
• an opportunity to sign up to other ACD services, such as WebCheck, if eligible

But importantly, existing subscribers should see no change in the way they receive alerts from the service or the frequency of alerts.

I’m already an Early Warning user – what do I need to do?

If your organisation already subscribes to Early Warning, you shouldn’t need to do anything. We’ll send out communications nearer the time and provide information about managing your record after you are migrated. We are expecting most existing users to experience minimal disruption during migration.

We will contact a small number of user organisations with specific actions that must be taken before migration happens.

What happens if I’m already using both MyNCSC and Early Warning?

Some organisations already have access to both MyNCSC and Early Warning, although most of the organisations migrating will be new to the MyNCSC platform. When organisations are migrated from the legacy Early Warning portal, records will automatically be migrated to a new team in the MyNCSC portal. Once migrated, you are free to alter your records as you would normally.

When will the migration happen?

The migration will begin the week beginning 26th June 2023 and we are aiming to complete the bulk of migrations within one month. We will contact all currently subscribing organisations to keep you up to date with the actions being taken.

Dan C, Incident Management Deputy Technical Director