NCSC Annual Review 2021

One of the NCSC’s most important priorities this year was to increase the resilience of the UK against cyber threats and strengthening the systems pivotal to the nation’s response to Covid-19. Chapter one of this review sets out some of the NCSC’s actions to identify and assess those threats and how it managed incidents and deterred and disrupted hostile actors.

This chapter describes how the NCSC engaged and advised sectors, developed new tools and services, and extended existing ones, to help central, devolved and local governments, businesses, organisations and citizens be more resilient to the threat and better able to respond and recover if attacks got through.

Businesses and organisations, as well as local government and the public sector, are increasingly dependent on digital technologies. These technologies help to drive growth and innovation across the economy but create new risks and challenges. Despite good progress made in recent years, many organisations are still not managing their cyber risk effectively, which is why the NCSC continued to work to ensure sectors were more secure and resilient to cyber threats.

As the UK’s technical authority, a key part of the NCSC’s work is to issue advisories and strategic warnings – with accompanying guidance - to help organisations better understand the risk and threat, and the actions they need to take to increase resilience against them.