Guidance
NCSC Annual Review 2021
Making the UK the safest place to live and work online
Pages
Page 5 of 44
NCSC Overview and Year 5 highlights
- The NCSC was established in 2016 to meet the need for a single focal point in government for cyber security, to improve our national defences and make the UK the safest place to live and work online.
- In the last 12 months, much of our work has focused on surging resources to protect the UK’s response to the Covid-19 response.
- Our pioneering Active Cyber Defence programme has taken down 2.3 million cyber-enabled commodity campaigns – including 442 phishing campaigns using NHS branding and 80 illegitimate NHS apps hosted and available to download outside of official app stores.
- When attacks have got through, we have offered support to 777 significant incidents– up from 723 the previous year – with around 20% of organisations supported linked to the health sector and vaccines.
- For example, we helped the University of Oxford’s Covid-19 vaccine researchers protect themselves from an attempted ransomware attempt with the potential to cause significant disruption to the UK’s pandemic response.
- Our Suspicious Email Reporting Service has received 5.4 million reports from the public of potentially malicious material – leading to the removal of more than 50,000 scams and more than 90,000 malicious URLs.
- Up to 3 million additional key workers were protected from unintentionally accessing malicious domains through our Protective Domain Name System service. This included over 1,000 new organisations within the Health and Social Care sector.
- Of course, our work hasn’t just been about the pandemic this year. We have engaged with around 5,000 organisations and issued guidance and threat assessments to 80 companies and 14 universities.
- In our attempt to increase the pipeline of skills and diversity of the cyber security profession, we have introduced more than 56,000 11-to- 17 year olds to the world of tech and cyber security through our CyberFirst programme – including around 6,500 pupils from 600 schools to the CyberFirst Girls competition.