Director GCHQ delivers keynote speech at CYBERUK 2019
In the speech to an audience of 2,500 people from across the tech community, including government, academia, and industry, Director GCHQ Jeremy Fleming, talked about our cyber security mission in the third decade of the internet age.
Drawing on the results of the recent UK Cyber Security survey which found that only 15% of people said they knew how to protect themselves online, he outlined how we plan to do more to take the burden of cyber security away from the individual. GCHQ will continue to work closely with device manufacturers and online platform providers to build security into their products and services at the design stage.
He shared the significant impact of the National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) Active Cyber Defence programme which uses automation to block attacks at scale in order to make the internet safer for people to use. Last month the UK hosted share of global phishing dropped below 2% for the first time, down from 5.4% in 2016 when the programme began.
He also provided an example of the success achieved by working in partnership with others, noting the work done with HMRC. In 2016, HMRC was the 16th most-phished brand globally, accounting for 1.25% of all phishing emails sent. Today it is ranked 146th and accounts for less than 0.1% of all phishing emails.
For the first time, he talked about how the NCSC is sharing real-time cyber security information with private sector so they can act on it. He also set out how we plan to scale this capability for all business sectors in order to build a genuinely national effort to tackle malign state cyber actors, criminal malware or people on the Dark Web trading credit card details.
In closing, Director stressed the need for continued and increasing collaboration between government, academia, industry partners both at home and abroad to ensure a safer, more successful UK.
CYBERUK is the UK government's flagship cyber security event, hosted by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). For more information, see the NCSC website.
