The UK’s leading cybersecurity agency has praised continued progress on its flagship initiative aimed at making the country the safest place to live and work online.
The National Cyber Security Center’s (NCSC) Sixth Annual Report on the Active Cyber Defense (ACD) Program found a 33% increase in potentially malicious emails reported to the Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS). , reached a record high of 7.1 million. report.
Read more about ACD: Proactive cyber defenses need to be rolled out across the UK: report
The NCSC claimed that this has enabled it to remove nearly 250,000 malicious website links from the internet since April 2020.
The report also found that UK organizations’ use of ACD’s free services increased by 39% overall. They are designed to protect even organizations without cybersecurity expertise.
This includes a 60% increase in our Mail Check service, designed to improve compliance with DMARC and other email anti-spoofing/privacy controls. His Web Check service at NCSC also saw a 26% year-over-year increase in user base in 2022.
The number of unique URLs and domains scanned by the service for known bugs and misconfigurations grew 33% each year.
Protected Domain Name Service (PDNS) users increased 24%. The report said 11 billion DNS queries for 420,000 domains and over 5 million requests for domains linked to ransomware were blocked.
NCSC also touted a 38% annual increase in customer organizations signing up for its early warning service that alerts them to potential attacks on their networks. Of these, over 500 were warned about possible malware active in their systems, 2,270 were warned about vulnerabilities, and 1,193 were warned about potentially malicious hosts on their network scanning the Internet. rice field.
The number of users of NCSC’s Exercise in a Box (EiaB) tool has also increased by 40% annually. The tool is designed to help organizations “practice and refine” their responses to cybersecurity threats.
“As this latest report shows, cybersecurity is not just the responsibility of technical experts. We are signing up extensively to maximize our expertise,” NCSC asserted. Jonathan Ellison, Director of Home Resilience and Future Technologies.
“Small businesses play a key role in making work and life safer online. An integrated MyNCSC platform coming soon.”
