UK share of visible global phishing attacks dropped from 5.3% (June 2016) to 3.1% (Nov 2017) removed 121,479 phishing sites hosted in the UK – and 18,067 worldwide spoofing UK government takedown availability times for sites spoofing government brands down from 42 hours to 10 hours a dramatic drop of scam emails from bogus ‘@gov.uk’ accounts (total of 515,658 rejected in year) average 4.5 million malicious emails per month blocked from reaching users (peak 30.3m in June) more than 1 million security scans and 7 million security tests carried out on public sector websites.
Dr Ian Levy, Technical Director of the NCSC, said:
“Through the National Cyber Security Centre, the UK has taken a unique approach that is bold and interventionalist, aiming to make the UK an unattractive target to criminals or nation states.
The ACD programme intends to increase our cyber adversaries’ risk and reduces their return on investment to protect the majority of people in the UK from cyber attacks.
The results we have published today are positive, but there is a lot more work to be done. The successes we have had in our first year will cause attackers to change their behaviour and we will need to adapt.
Our measures seem to already be having a great security benefit - we now need to incentivise others to do similar things to scale up the benefits to best protect the UK from commodity cyber attacks in a measurable way.”
The report lists scam domains promoted by phishing emails that have now been removed, such as onlinehmrc-gov.uk, refunds-dvla.co.uk and nationalcrime-agency.com and shares examples of real phishing emails they have prevented from being delivered. It also puts on record the 10 most spoofed government brands in the year, with HMRC the most targeted with 16,064 fake websites taken down. Also in the list are the DVLA, the Student Loans Company and the Crown Prosecution Service. The report also breaks down the brands which have been most successfully protected from criminals for each month. Amongst the organisations best defending themselves from spoof attempts thanks to implementing ACD are local authorities such as Northumberland County Council (59,405 attempts in August), Cardiff Council (31,728 in December) and Denbighshire County Council (25,627 in May).
The full report is available on the NCSC website - ‘Active Cyber Defence – One Year On’ .
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Calling payroll providers and agents of new employers – share your experience with HMRC 15 February 2018
HMRC is looking to better understand the experience of our customers through life events – such as significant change in income, starting work for the first time.
“We are currently exploring the experience of our customers and their representatives when becoming an employer. The life event being ‘I am a small business owner and I need an extra pair of hands’
We have engaged with customers and explored their pain points and potential opportunities for improvement and would now like to talk to agents to understand their perspective. We acknowledge that taking on a new pair of hands brings on new responsibility - not just legal but also responsibility for another's livelihood. We are reaching out to representatives of employers who can help us gain further insight in to their experience of taking on an employee, registering and operating payroll. The knowledge we gain is invaluable to understanding the real customer experience and develop the case of change.” The team involved with this project are looking to arrange telephone interviews that will last no longer than one hour to be held at a time to be agreed on 21 or 22 February. We know from talking to many members at National Forums and other member events that you, as agents and payroll providers to new employers, have extensive experiences in this area. If you would be open to sharing 1 hour of your time to put forward the agents insight in this area your contributions will be incredibly valuable to this project.
The Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals
Policy News Journal
cipp.org.uk
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