It was reported that the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has been rather successful in protecting UK citizens and organisations from cyberattacks thanks to its Active Cyber Defence (ACD) programme.

The ACD programme aims to protect UK internet users from harm from cyberattacks as much as possible. It covers a number of core services such as protective domain name services (PDNS), web and mail checks, logging made easy (LME) vulnerability disclosures, among others.

Hence, the NCSC declared that it was able to defeat activities leading to less harm online as well as find new ways to reinforce the cybersecurity of organizations.

It was found out that 17,399 of the campaigns discovered in 2019 were using UK government branding in some way. Moreover, the programme was able to block 80 million queries to 175,000 unique domains.

It was also discovered that the most frequently used malware in 2019 were Emotet, Necurs, Kraken, Sphinx, Neutrino, Cerber, CryptoLocker, GandCrab, WannaCry, NotPetya, BadRabbit, Ramnit, Tiny Banker and Conficker.