Active Cyber Defence (ACD) - the fourth year
"How can we use it to help..." was the theme of our Active Cyber Defence (ACD) efforts in 2020.
As the pandemic took hold, we looked at ways in which we could use the ACD tools, services and projects to support people and organisations moving to a working from home model, and also to protect the health, retail, and other sectors during that critical period.
The year ended with a very different challenge, as we took an important role in responding to the SolarWinds Orion compromise and its impact on the UK.
The aim of the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme is to “Protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.”
The report is broken down by individual effort, but these aren’t siloed efforts: each service and project influences, supports, and guides the others. This can be seen in data from the Vulnerability Reporting Service highlighting the scale of the ‘Dangling DNS’ problem, and the team addressing that problem using data from Protective DNS (PDNS) to improve their detection capability. Similar supportive flows exist across the portfolio, and are growing as the efforts mature.
We’ve also made this report less “numbers heavy”, and instead have tried to focus on key stories and important trends that we have discovered in the course of our work. Despite the uniqueness of the events in 2020, we’ve included comparisons to 2019 as we have in previous years.
As is mentioned throughout, this is a team effort, including UK public sector, commercial and international partners without whom we wouldn’t be able to implement these national scale cyber security defences.
We welcome feedback on this report, particularly ideas for improved approaches, data that would be useful in include future reports, and comparisons or pointers to similar efforts. Please contact us at [email protected] or via our social media channels.
