28 February 2018

Active Cyber Defence – one year on


A paper written by Dr Ian Levy, Technical Director of the NCSC, following a year of the Active Cyber Defence programme.

In November 2016, the UK government launched the new National Cyber Security Centre strategy. This strategy had many effects, including setting up the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) as part of GCHQ and giving it the mandate to pursue the radical action required to better protect the UK’s interests in cyberspace.

A key strand in this approach has been the NCSC’s Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme, which aspires to protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm, caused by the majority of the attacks, for the majority of the time. It is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, rather than the highly sophisticated and targeted attacks, which we deal with in other ways.

The NCSC was founded on principles of evidence and transparency. One purpose of the ‘One Year On’ paper is to make good on this commitment by cataloguing some of the work we have done in 2017 under the ACD programme, publishing data that has been generated by the work, trying to draw outcomes from it and making all of that available for scrutiny and challenge.

You can read the paper here, or you can download it using the tab at the top of this page.

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