Protective DNS (PDNS) by NCSC UK adds UK schools

This week NCSC have begun accepting UK schools for access to the PDNS.

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/introducing-pdns-for-schools

to register (if you are eligible) use this URL: https://www.protectivedns.service.ncsc.gov.uk/pdns

you can view the terms and conditions here: https://www.signin.service.ncsc.gov.uk/terms-and-conditions

PDNS is a protective DNS service which helps protect public sector organisations (and private sector services who deliver government services)

Government
Healthcare
Local Authorities
MOD

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/information/pdns

PDNS is delivered by Nominet. Read more “Protective DNS (PDNS) by NCSC UK adds UK schools” →

Leadership

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) & Cyber Essentials

Do you have a VDI solution in use at your business? Be that something like CITRIX, VMware View or Remote Desktop Services (VDI mode or Server Based Computing SBC) mode?

Well let’s consider this with regard to cyber essentials.

In a recent update post:

The January changes to the Cyber Essentials scheme reflect the changing cyber threats in today’s digital environment – Iasme

Threat Intel

Royal Mail Cyber Attack! What should you do?

breaking news: Royal mails international tracking services are down and have been for > 24 hours:

The ICO have been contacted! The NCSC and NCA have been contacted! What should you do?

Guides

Cyber Essentials for Ubuntu Servers

I thought about doing a step by step bash script or CLI walkthrough but decided to go with the high levels steps. If we wanted to ensure our Linux servers are configured in alignment with Cyber Essentials what are the main areas we need to consider? For this I’m using Ubuntu Server as a base, I’ve not gone through every line in the standard but these should be in line with the 5 areas and fit within the Cyber Essentials theme. As always there are many ways to skin a cat! (don’t skin cats they are frens!). Anyway hope this is useful.

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:

Education

Security Awareness Training Example

Introduction

There are tons of “products” for security awarenss training, however you might find that sitting and watching canned CBT videos isn’t your organisations thing or perhaps you want to see what other options there are available. Well for starts the UK NCSC has some free online security awarenss training (see further down the post), or you may want to actually spend time with your staff to make the learning a collaboarive experiance that drives engagement and communication. If the last one if your desired approach there are lots of ways to do this. One of which can be supported by a question based assessment, other ways include tabletop scenarios and incident simulations (i honestly would go with a blended appraoch if it was me!).

So to help people get thinking about this I’ve put together some example questions to drive the message about incident reporting, collaboration and education vs blame. So here we go, here’s some ideas for communication and some questions to get staff thinking about cyber security, sure they aren’t rocket science, but then it doesn’t need to be!

Guides

Measuring Cyber Essentials: Windows Security Configuration

Measuring Compliance with standards is easy right?

Checking an environment configuration is one of those things where it’s easy to say and harder to do. If we take the cyber essentials standard and look at the requirements, they are quite different from say the CIS baselines. This alone makes for some fun, let’s investigate this further:

CIS baselines are based on a specific component e.g., Windows Server or Windows client and is contextually aware of roles: e.g., Domain Controller vs Member Server.

Is this registry key set?

Guides

Cyber Essentials Readiness

So, you have a driver to achieve cyber essentials, great stuff. Now if you are a business of reasonable size and scale this activity requires a bit of planning, context and lots of access and data. This could be via a distributed team or via a dedicated project team. In this post I’m going to look at what you may need to conduct the planning, discovery, assessment, and certification for Cyber Essentials and/or CE+.

Defence

The Director of GCHQ speaks at CyberUK 2022

Sir Jeremy Fleming was speaking at CyberUK, the UK’s flagship cyber security conference this week.

The full presentation is here but I’ve picked out some key highlights.

“Of course, we can count ourselves lucky compared to those caught up in wars, but we are also seeing a heightened cyber risk. Cyber criminals are consistently evolving their tactics; the lines are blurring with hostile state activity and ransomware remains a real threat.”

“Cyber clearly matters to everyone.”

“At the global level, the UK has developed as a cyber power. Alongside the more traditional forms of diplomacy and statecraft, cyber now plays a vital role in our national security and prosperity.”