NCSC Releases 2020 Annual Review

The United Kingdom (UK) National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has released its Annual Review 2020, which focuses on its response to evolving and challenging cyber threats. Recognizing cybersecurity as a “team sport,” the publication includes highlights of NCSC’s collaboration with many partners, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). A few examples:

• Joint Advisory AA20-126A: APT Groups Target Healthcare and Essential Services, which warned of observed “large-scale ‘password spraying’ campaigns against healthcare bodies and medical research organizations” and provided mitigation advice for this threat.
• Joint Advisory AA20-245A: Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity, which NCSC calls “an incident response playbook … applicable to the widest set of countries and situations possible.”
• The NCSC’s Secure Design Principles blog and CISA’s Cybersecurity Best Practices for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) guide. As stated by NCSC, these publications represent a CISA-NCSC “joint venture [to] set out risks faced by ICS owners and operators … to help them design and secure ICS, mitigate risks, and protect against the ever-evolving threats.”