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 improve public and private sector organisations' protection against distributed denial of service attacks.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) provides and regularly updates guidance for a wide range of public and private sector organisations, including in the critical national infrastructure. 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 Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is 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. 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.