Britain’s Free Cyber Security Service

The British National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has recently released a new email security checking service to help organisations identify vulnerabilities that can let hackers spoof emails or create email privacy breaches. According to their official statement the Email Security Check device requires no sign-ups or personal details.

All UK social housing providers have also been offered access to free cyber security services by the NCSC, in a move supported by Housemark, the data and insight company for the UK housing sector

The NCSC provides a range of free cyber security tools and services to eligible organisations as part of the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme. This service is now provided online for free to help some UK sectors having a superficial adoption of recommended email security controls and is as low as just 7% in some cases. 

The UK government stated that the Email Security Check is intended to help secure organisational email systems, in two distinct ways.

• First, by making it difficult for fake emails to be sent from the organisation’s domains.

• Second, by protecting your email in transit with Transport Layer Security (TLS). 

TLS is a protocol that encrypts and delivers email data securely, for both inbound and outbound email traffic. It helps prevent eaves-dropping between email servers, keeping your messages private while they're moving between email providers. TLS is being adopted as the standard for email security.

It works by checking publicly available Internet DNS records to verify if anti-spoofing controls are correctly configured and the TLS configuration by initiating server communication. TLS checks that anti-spoofing standards are configured correctly to help organisations prevent cyber criminals from abusing their domain and sending out malicious emails pretending to be them. 

“It also looks up whether privacy protocols, such as TLS, are in place to ensure that emails are encrypted when in transit so they cannot be accessed and remain confidential between mail servers.” the NCSC said.

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