By Kevin Townsend on May 12, 2021
UK s National Cyber Security Centre highlights the success of its Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program
The UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC – part of GCHQ) Active Cyber Defense (ACD) program is an ambitious project designed to improve the security posture of an entire nation. It does this primarily through the rapid identification and takedown of malicious websites; the timely delivery of actionable threat intelligence to organizations; and a range of other mechanisms.
ACD primarily serves UK government departments, agencies and ‒ since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic ‒ the NHS. However, a new facet known as ACD Broadening, is actively exploring the expansion of the service to include private sector organizations and even foreign countries and their governments.
Water regulator has handled more than 20,000 malicious emails in 2021
Malicious emails peaked in March
Ofwat regulates privatised water and sewage across the UK
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Phishing attacks using UK government themes more than doubled during 2020, with the largest number targeting the brand of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Its newly published fourth annual report on the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) service has also highlighted a big increase in phishing using NHS branding over the year.
The ACD programme was introduced in 2016 and comprises a number of services to provide protection from online threats, including Mail Check, Web Check, Protective DNS, Exercise in a Box and the Suspicious Email Reporting Service.
It identifies phishing – a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data – as the largest cyber threat involving the public sector. Its figures on takedowns of phishing campaigns show 11,286 for 2020, up from 4,471 the previous year, while the takedowns of URLs totalled 59,435, up from 25,741.
NCSC records 15-fold increase in online scam removal
More than 700,500 online scams were taken down by the agency last year
NCSC records 15-fold increase in online scam removal
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The GCHQ body revealed the figures in its annual
Active Cyber Defence (ACD) report. ACD is the NCSC’s four-year-old strategy to protect the public sector and, where possible, a broader audience.
It does so via a toolkit of around 14 initiatives, headed by the Takedown Service, which involves finding and removing malicious websites from the internet.
As well as 700,000+ websites, the service removed 1.4 million malicious URLs. Although COVID-19 scams surged in 2020, the NCSC said that the 15-fold increase in the volume of sites taken down was due to an expansion of the service, which saw it invest in a wider set of measures to address “different categories of campaigns.”