Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what support they are offering each of the Crown Dependencies in building cyber-resilience, broken down by dependency.

The Government is committed to supporting the Crown Dependencies in deterring and defending against state and non-state threats. Since its creation in 2016, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has supported the Crown Dependencies in building their cyber resilience. The NCSC supports the governments, police and communications service providers of the Crown Dependencies, engaging with them on a regular basis to provide expert advice, guidance, the latest threat assessments and support related to incidents affecting their networks. The governments of the Crown Dependencies also use a range of Active Cyber Defence tools and services provided by the NCSC.

Although a breakdown of costs is not available, examples of support includes:

• The NCSC supported and advised on the formation of Cyber Security Incident Response Teams in the Crown Dependencies. Jersey Cyber Emergency Response Team (CERT) has now been established and is responsible for promoting and improving the cyber resilience across the Island’s critical national infrastructure.

• The NCSC have attended events on each of the Crown Dependencies in recent years, presenting at the Isle of Man’s Cyber Isle cyber Conference in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Attendees were informed about the NCSC’s free products and services available to all Crown Dependencies covering public, private and third sectors;

• The Governments of the Crown Dependencies, are eligible for and are using NCSC Active Cyber Defence services including Mail Check, Web Check, Early Warning and Protective DNS. These are the same tools used by HMG to help protect our networks.