NCSC Annual Review 2021

Since its inception in April 2020, the Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) has been a successful way of enabling the public and businesses to report suspicious emails, leading to the removal of thousands of scams.

The service, which was launched in partnership with the City of London Police, received more than 7,250,000 reports leading to the removal of more than 59,900 scams and 112,000 malicious URLs – many of which the NCSC would not have seen.

The NCSC worked with Microsoft to introduce an innovation to simplify reporting suspicious emails. Technicians created the Report Phishing tool for Microsoft Office 365 which allows reports to be sent directly to SERS, as well as their organisation’s IT team, with one click of an on-screen button. To support this new tool the NCSC published guidance on how to install the button - which can be downloaded to an organisation’s systems from Microsoft’s AppSource site.

Building on the success of SERS, a new service was launched this year to enable the public to report scam websites. The Suspicious Website Reporting Service allows the public to report malicious websites for direct assessment by the NCSC, who can take them down if necessary. The NCSC has previously highlighted the problem of scam websites using fake news pages where celebrities such as Sir Richard Branson appeared to be endorsing enticing investment schemes.