No one is responsible for your OWN Cyber Defences…

Introduction

I talk to hundreds or maybe even thousands of people online. I work in the Cyber security industry, I worked previously with central government, local authorities, finance, third sector, healthcare, defence and well most verticals of business. I often see people comment online about how “GCHQ has failed” or some other silly nonsense when it comes to an organisation (not GCHQ) being victim to a cyber incident.

I fear the world has watched a few too many Bond and Bourne films and let’s their imaginations run wild! The true reality of defending cyberspace is frankly vastly different to what I think people believe it is.

Reviews

Protected: The undeclared war

Leadership

UK NCSC Active Cyber Defence (ACD)

Defending a single server is often far more complex than people apreciate, defending a single organisation is significantly harder than a single server, defending a country… a much more complex challenge than I think people actually realise.

What is ACD?

According to the NCSC:

The aim of ACD is to “Protect the majority of people in the UK from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.” We do this through a wide range of mechanisms, which at their core have the ability to provide protection at scale.
ACD is intended to tackle the high-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives, rather than the highly sophisticated and targeted attacks, which NCSC deal with in other ways.
UK NCSC

NCSC Active Cyber Defence

What is included?

The UK NCSC offer and run a range of Active Cyber Defence capabilities which include the following:

Defense

CyberChef Taster

A quick snack

Everyone knows about cyber chef, right? Well, I can tell you now that my misses knows so if you don’t now’s a great time to get to know! Cyber Chef is a tool created by GCHQ distrubted via an apache license that’s hosted on GitHub or you can download and run locally. Read more “CyberChef Taster” →