UK is being hit by more cyberattacks than ever before, NCSC warns

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The NCSC has released its latest Annual Review report
It claims the number of attacks is up, and reaching unprecedented levels
The head of NCSC commented that the cyber risk is "widely underestimated"

The UK is being hit with more cyberattacks than ever before, with academia, manufacturing, and IT being among the most targeted verticals.

In the latest iteration of its Annual Review, National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) said its Incident Management (IM) team received 1,957 reports this year, from a “range of sectors.”

The team triaged the reports down into 430 incidents worthy of its attention, up from 371 last year. Of those incidents, 89 were said to have been “nationally significant”, and 12 were “at the top end of the scale and more severe in nature”. This number has also increased three times, compared to last year the NCSC added.

Biggest targets

Over the course of the year, the IM team sent out 542 bespoke notifications informing businesses of a cyberattack that impacts them, and sharing advice and guidance on how to tackle the problem.

This number has also doubled compared to last year (258), the NCSC added, saying that almost half of the notifications sent this year related to pre-ransomware activity.

The biggest targets this year were academia, manufacturing, IT, legal, charities, and constructions. The organization said it received 317 reports of ransomware activity, either directly from the victims, or from its partners, another statistic that increased year-on-year (297). The IM team triaged it into 20 incidents that it addressed, 13 of which were “nationally significant” and included NHS trusts and the British Library.

During the launch of the Annual Review, the head of NSCS, Richard Horne, said that the cyber risks the country is facing are “widely underestimated”.

“What has struck me more forcefully than anything else since taking the helm at the NCSC is the clearly widening gap between the exposure and threat we face, and the defenses that are in place to protect us,” he said. “And what is equally clear to me is that we all need to increase the pace we are working at to keep ahead of our adversaries.

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.