The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) in the UK claims to have sent 33 million notifications to businesses that have joined up for its “Early Warning” program. Furthermore, in 2021, the government agency dealt with a record amount of online scams, eliminating almost 2.7 million from the internet.
False celebrity endorsements for bitcoin giveaways, COVID-19-related efforts, phony extortion emails mimicking the NCSC or other national law enforcement authorities, and fake parcel delivery notices are among the schemes targeted by the NCSC.
The Active Cyber Defense (ACD) program was upgraded in 2021 to help combat rising threats, making it possible to fight scammers.
A year to remember
According to the NCSC, the record number of online frauds caught and eliminated is due to increased defenses rather than an increase in scam activity.
“Rather than an increase in scams overall, the increase reflects the development of NCSC services to take down additional dangerous online content, such as phony celebrity endorsement frauds,” adds NCSC.
“The NCSC’s efforts has been aided by public reports of questionable emails, texts, and websites, which have allowed it to delete even more scammers.”
In 2021, the organization detected and eliminated over 1,400 NHS-themed phishing operations, an increase of 11 times over the previous year’s figures.
The Flubot virus for Android devices, which is transmitted to smartphone users via “missing delivery” SMS, is another famous case of mass takedowns. The NCSC slowed its spread by prohibiting more than 1.2 million domains linked to it.
Overall, the 2.7 million scams banned in 2021 are four times greater than the same number of scams found and halted in 2020.
Early Notice
The rise of the Early Warning service, which had 4,600 customers by the end of the year, was perhaps NCSC’s most important task for 2021.
The service flagged 90,410 occurrences per day on average, indicating that something possibly harmful was found on a customer’s machine.
In the following three situations, the Early Warning service sends out alerts:
Malware has successfully infiltrated a system.
Aggressive network scanning, for example, is a sign of possible abuse.
The internet is exposed to vulnerable services and unprotected ports.
Check out this website for further information on how to sign up for the Early Warning program.
Finally, the NCSC invites everyone to view keynote presentations from this year’s CYBERUK conference on its YouTube site. The conference will cover important cybersecurity themes such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as interactive workshops.
