NCSC Annual Review 2022
Looking back at the National Cyber Security Centre's sixth year and its key developments and highlights, between 1 September 2021 and 31 August 2022.
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Page 17 of 33
Active Cyber Defence
One of the most important initiatives pioneered by the NCSC is its Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme. The core premise of ACD is to tackle high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, doing small things at scale that add up to make a big difference.
In May, the NCSC published its fifth report into ACD, setting out the programme’s impact so far. Notably this year, the Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) reached the milestone of 10 million reports, resulting in the take-down of 76,000 scams. By the end of August 2022, the number of reports (since April 2020) had risen to 13.7m, while the number of scam URL addresses taken down, that were previously unknown to UK authorities, had risen to 174,000.
In April, the NCSC opened up its Web Check and Mail Check services to the whole education sector for the first time to protect websites and email servers of schools, colleges and universities from cyber attacks.
34m
alerts sent by the newest ACD service Early Warning
One of the newest ACD services, Early Warning, which is free and open to any organisation, had by the end of August 2022 sent 34 million alerts to its 7,500 and growing members to inform them of threats, risks, vulnerabilities and open ports in their networks.
At the year’s end there had been a 42% increase in users of the Exercise in a Box service; a 37% increase in users of Web Check; 46% decrease in fake government scams; and a 23% rise in the number of organisations using PDNS.
ACD services and results
| ACD service | What is it, and who is it for? | What happened this year? |
|---|---|---|
| Mail Check | helps public and third sector assess and improve email security compliance to prevent criminals spoofing email domains | New users increased by 43% (from 1386 to 2448)
Domain Messaged Authentication Reporting (DMARC) protection in place has increased:
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| Email Security Check | is free for all UK organisations to check for correctly applied standards like DMARC and Transport Layer Security (TLS) | Since launch in April 2022 the service has been used for 32,000 checks |
| Web Check | helps users find and fix common security vulnerabilities in their websites |
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| Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) | allows the public to report potential scam messages for removal |
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| Takedown Service | works with hosts to remove malicious sites and infrastructure from the internet |
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| Exercise in a Box (EiaB) | a toolkit of scenarios for organisations to refine their response to cyber incidents | New users increased by 42% (from 11,851 to 16,808) |
| Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) | prevents users accessing malicious domains or IP addresses | Organisations using PDNS rose 23% (from 928 to 1140) |
| Vulnerability Disclosure Service | to report, manage and remediate vulnerabilities in government and other key services | Over 750 reported vulnerabilities across the UK government remediated |
| Early Warning | a free service to notify members about potential attacks, compromises, vulnerabilities or open ports on their networks |
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Coming next for ACD
In the coming year the NCSC is expected to increase the scale and scope of ACD further. This includes releasing its first service designed for small businesses and organisations, who run their own website, email domain or office file server, to improve understanding of their potential vulnerabilities. This is designed to be a practical and easy-to-use tool – and free to any UK organisation – and the NCSC is confident it has the potential to require cyber criminals to “raise the bar” in order to carry out successful attacks.
Behind the scenes the NCSC is also working to improve ACD services for security professionals in larger organisations, particularly those in the public sector and operators of critical national infrastructure. They are expected to see services, such as vulnerability scanning, being expanded, deepened and coming together in a more consistent way.