NCSC dealing with increased number of incidents over last eight months.
The NCSC has dealt with more than 200 incidents since September 2024; double the amount year-on-year.
According to media reports, NCSC CEO Richard Horne said this number includes twice as many nationally significant incidents as the same period a year ago.
Speaking at the CyberUK conference in Manchester, Horne warned that adversaries were “probing for weaknesses” and operating daily in a grey area “between peace and war” to pursue geopolitical goals.
He described the grey area as “that murky space between peace and war where states and non-state actors engage in competitive activity.” He also said “hostile nation states have weaponised their cyber capabilities.”
Speaking on the current attacks against retailers, Horne refused to speculate on who the attackers are, how they got in, what they managed to access or whether the attacks are linked.
However he did say that all organisations need to see this as a wake-up call — to understand what their exposure is to cyber-attacks, to ensure they’ve got the right defences in place, “and to make sure they’ve got a plan to be able to continue operations and recover should they be hit by a cyber attack.”
Written by
Dan Raywood is a B2B journalist with 25 years of experience, including covering cybersecurity for the past 17 years. He has extensively covered topics from Advanced Persistent Threats and nation-state hackers to major data breaches and regulatory changes.
He has spoken at events including 44CON, Infosecurity Europe, RANT Forum, BSides Scotland, Steelcon and the National Cyber Security Show, and served as editor of SC Media UK, Infosecurity Magazine and IT Security Guru. He was also an analyst with 451 Research and a product marketing lead at Tenable.
