On 16 July 2019, UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) released the second annual report of the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program. The report seeks to show the effects that the program has on the security of the UK public sector and the wider UK cyber ecosystem.
The Active Cyber Defence Program
NCSC was set up in 2016 to be the single authoritative voice for cybersecurity in the United Kingdom. This was part of the wider National Cyber Security Strategy that sought to make the Government much more interventionist in the protection of the UK as a whole. Part of that interventionist strategy is the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) program.
The mission of the ACD Program is to “Protect the majority of people in the United Kingdom from the majority of the harm caused by the majority of the cyber attacks the majority of the time.”
The ACD program deals only with commodity attacks. (Targeted attacks by sophisticated threat actors are dealt with by other NCSC programs.) As such, the program’s intention is to raise the cost and risk of commodity cyber attacks against the United Kingdom, therefore reducing the return on investment for the criminals.
It is universally understood that…
