The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said the UK Government’s new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will be a crucial step towards a more effective regulatory regime in the sector.
It has published a blogpost on the bill, which was announced in the King’s Speech to Parliament last week, saying it is “a landmark moment tackling the growing threat to the UK’s critical systems”.
This follows last week’s global outage of IT systems which, although not caused by a cyber attack, showed their potential for widespread disruption of critical services.
NCSC said there is a threat to critical systems from criminals spreading ransomware and state aligned groups that pose a threat to the UK.
Powerful tool
“Effective regulation, enforced by capable and well resourced regulators, is one of Government’s most powerful tools to accelerate progress and impose cost on adversaries,” it said. “The proposed legislation is a crucial step towards a more comprehensive and effective regulatory regime, fit for our volatile world.”
It added that it has worked with government “to ensure the proposed changes meet the reality we see in our day-to-day work, and that: “The proposed package will make it harder for malicious actors to exploit weak points in critical national infrastructure supply chains, and will also address some of the common constraints on regulators.”
A briefing document published with the King’s Speech indicated that the bill will update the regulatory framework by expanding the remit of regulation to more services and supply chains. This will include the mandation of increased incident reporting to give government better data on cyber attacks.
