‘High-volume commodity attacks that affect people’s everyday lives’: NCSC shows the scale of cyber attacks

Want an idea of just how many hacking attacks affect Britain every year?

Well, be careful for what you wish for – as the answer may well shock you.

In just one year, that piled up to 18,067 unique phishing sites across 2,929 attack groups pretending to be from a UK government brand all over the world; 121,479 unique phishing sites across 20,763 attack groups physically hosted in the UK; 1,719 compromised sites in the UK that were being used to host 5,111 attacks and 3,243 Advance Fee Fraud attacks, pretending to be related to UK government – and at its peak in December 2017, UK public sector DNS services was responding to 1.23 billion requests a week.

That’s the sobering assessment of the national body tasked with protecting UK Plc – the National Cyber Security Centre, with the data being shared in the form of a new report, Active Cyber Defence – One Year On, by the organisation’s Technical Director UK, Dr. Ian Levy (download the full report from here).

For Levy, the data shows that, “We committed to providing evidence that the measures we are taking are having a positive effect on the security of the UK. The work we have done already seems to show that these measures have a security benefit, but we need to incentivise others to do similar things in order to scale the benefits to protect the UK from the harm caused by commodity cyber attack in a measurable way.”

Levy goes on to say his report is intended to provide (at least the start of) an evidence base to incentivise others – both industry and other governments worldwide – to take similar measures to help reduce the harm caused by commodity cyber attack globally.

“We do not claim that what is presented here is sufficient or optimal, but it is a set of measures that provide objective benefit in a measurable way.

“We hope that this is the start of a change in how cyber security is handled at national scale in the UK and shows the benefit of the government’s approach as codified in the national strategy.”