Cybercrime: Infrastructure

(asked on 14th September 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps the Government is taking to protect critical national infrastructure from distributed denial of service attacks.


Answered by
Matt Hancock Portrait
Matt Hancock
This question was answered on 11th October 2017

The National Cyber Security Centre provides and regularly updates guidance for a range of public and private sector organisations, including in the critical national infrastructure (CNI). The guidance encourages organisations to understand and design their systems to be resilient to a range of common attacks, including Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The NCSC’s Active Cyber Defence programme is a mechanism through which it is working with the Internet Service Provider community in order to make DDoS attacks harder systemically.

The Government is working closely with CNI operators to ensure they are adequately protected from cyber threats, including DDoS attacks. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is currently consulting on the proposed implementation of the EU Network and Information Systems (NIS) Directive. This Directive will place a legal obligation on operators of essential services to ensure they have appropriate security measures in place to deal with cyber threats. DCMS is also considering the need for the right incentives to be in place to build security into internet-connected products and services. This will help protect devices from being hijacked or misused as part of a DDoS attack.

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