A “Whole-of-Society" Approach To Cyber Crime

Uploaded on 2023-07-14 in NEWS-Cybersecurity News, FREE TO VIEW

The sixth annual Report from Active Cyber Defence (ACD) highlights success of a “whole-of-society" approach in preventing millions of cyber attacks from reaching UK organisations and citizens each year.

UK Business and citizens reported a suspicious email or website every five seconds in 2022, a new report from GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said on Thursday 6th July - that's 7.1 million suspicious emails and URLs which were flagged by UK organisations and citizens via the NCSC’s reporting service between January 2022 and December 2022, which is the equivalent of nearly 20,000 reports a day.

The reports, many of which came from UK businesses, contributed to the direct removal of nearly a quarter of a million (235,000) malicious URLs from the internet by the NCSC since SERS, the first service of its kind globally, launched in April 2020. It took less than 6 hours on average for the NCSC to remove reported malicious URLs from the internet.

The finding is one of many insights from the NCSC which takes a “whole-of-society" approach to cyber crime and prevents millions of high-volume cyber attacks from ever reaching UK organisations and citizens each year.

Jonathon Ellison, NCSC Director for National Resilience and Future Technology, said “In a cyber threat environment that resembles the Hydra – cut down one attack, another springs up in its place – ACD is once again doing unparalleled work to keep the country safe. As this latest report shows, cyber security is not the sole preserve of tech specialists: businesses are increasingly alive to and eager to engage with the cyber risks they face, signing up in swathes to make the most of NCSC data and expertise."

Businesses’ growing appetite for cyber security in 2022 led to 39% more organisations signing up for ACD’s free services which are designed to empower users without specialist knowledge or a dedicated security function at work to boost their cyber resilience.

Small businesses constitute 99% of the UK’s business ecosystem and are hence indispensable to national prosperity. They also, however, face a unique set of behavioural barriers, financial pressures and competing priorities to achieving robust cyber security, often not having the expertise or allocated resource to give cyber due attention. Martin McTague, National Chair of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), commented “While security is important, we’ve long championed building cyber resilience among small firms, given the persistent risk of cybercrime... A fifth of small businesses see cybercrime as the most impactful crime in terms of both cost and disruption to their operations.

Given their unique vulnerability, the NCSC launched two accessible ACD services last year to help a higher number of small businesses to better protect themselves.

The Email Security Check service provides a quick and simple way of understanding aspects of email security like anti-spoofing and email encryption. Since launching in April 2022, it has scanned over 54,000 email domains. The Check Your Cyber Security (CYCS) guide is a scalable vulnerability check tool designed specifically for small organisations to fix their critical vulnerabilities without requiring ongoing support from the NCSC.

Other key highlights from 2022, the sixth year of ACD’s operations, include:

Phishing scams remain the most prevalent form of attack hosted in the UK, though the amount of global phishing campaigns hosted in the UK has declined.

Opportunistic attacks on the HMG brand decreased by 17% while the crisis in Ukraine was a consistent pretence for cryptocurrency scams throughout 2022.

ACD’s Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS), which provides safeguards to prevent organisations from accessing malicious sites containing malware, phishing attacks and more, blocked 11 billion DNS queries for 420,000 domains in 2022.

Businesses can access the ACD Report along with a range if guidance on practical cyber secuity measures via the NCSC website.

You Might Also Read:

Phishing – It’s Not About Malware (Or Even Email):

___________________________________________________________________________________________

If you like this website and use the comprehensive 6,500-plus service supplier Directory, you can get unrestricted access, including the exclusive in-depth Directors Report series, by signing up for a Premium Subscription.