Security News > 2021 > November > You wanna use GCHQ offshoot NCSC's threat intel feeds? Why not, say bosses

Britain's National Cyber Security Centre is prepared to share its cyber defence tech and threat intel feeds with British organisations in need of extra help, it said at the launch of its annual review today.

You probably don't want the country's DNS being run by GCHQ! Chief techie Ian Levy highlighted the NCSC's Protective DNS service to The Register as one example of good things the cyber defence organisation has done, with the custom DNS resolver service being used by 1,000 NHS supply chain firms to prevent their devices visiting known malicious web domains.

Levy pointed out that NCSC's PDNS service is of limited use for the wider private sector, adding: "You probably don't want the country's DNS being run by GCHQ!". Paul Maddinson, NCSC director of national resilience, added: "What we can certainly do is work with the private sector to develop similar capabilities themselves we're really happy to share both the technology [and] the threat intelligence feeds."

We understand the NCSC has an internal "Grand challenge" for its staffers to figure out just how vulnerable the UK public sector is to cyber attacks and ransomware, focusing on a data science-driven approach to ascertaining which orgs are most vulnerable to the latter.

There's a long chain of UK.gov suppliers stretching deep into the private sector, and in turn many of those are potentially vulnerable to supply chain attacks targeted at their MSPs. Active Cyber Defence is the NCSC scheme for blunting common-or-garden cyber attacks by offering threat reduction advice and some simple tools.

"The Active Cyber Defence programme has taken down 2.3 million cyber-enabled commodity campaigns, 442 phishing campaigns using NHS branding, and 80 illegitimate NHS apps hosted and available to download outside of official app stores," concluded a cheerful NCSC. It's a small dent in the tidal wave of malicious sites and services online but a good one to make.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/11/17/ncsc_annual_review/