The annual review published by The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the UK’s technical authority for cyber security, illustrates the severity of the ransomware threat in the UK.
The report reveals that the onslaught of ransomware attacks shows no sign of easing in the future. In the first four months of 2021 alone, the NCSC reports that it handled the same number of ransomware incidents as for the whole of 2020 - a number that was itself already more than three times greater than in 2019.
According to the DCMS Cyber Security Breaches Survey, published in March 2021, 39 per cent of all UK businesses (2.3m) reported a cyber breach or attack in 2020/21.
The report also highlighted the increased threat of supply chain attacks. Notably, in March 2021 an attack on vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Servers led to at least 30,000 organisations being compromised in the US alone.
This is the fifth annual review published by the NCSC, examining the key...