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.
Pages
Page 22 of 33
National context
When the government established the NCSC in 2016 their focus was primarily domestic and aimed at ensuring proactive state intervention to reduce threats to UK systems, organisations and citizens.
The new National Cyber Strategy broadened the emphasis to include offensive, as well as defensive, capabilities and objectives, and shifted from a largely domestic focus to one that recognises that today’s challenges are increasingly international.
This new focus was in recognition of technology-leadership shifting to authoritarian regimes in South-East Asia in a trend that could have profound implications for Western-style democracies. China’s strategy of protecting its domestic market while exploiting global trade has existed since the 1990s. However, in the last five years China has extended its effort from dominating technology manufacturing to now influencing the foundational rules that define the next generation of technology design and development.
Over the past year, the NCSC continued to track and assess the implications and risks of key areas of this shift in leadership: technology standards and digital dependence, and the implications of both.