Ransomware is the biggest cyber threat facing the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) CEO Lindy Cameron is expected to warn today.
Cameron will deliver the warning at the Royal United Services Institute's (RUSI) defence and security think tank on Monday afternoon, during which she'll be delivering the second Annual Security Lecture.
Think tanks are a likely target for "nation-state espionage groups" as they seek to obtain intel about government policy and trade agreements, according to Cameron. However, the majority of UK citizens and businesses, including infrastructure providers and government service providers, are likely to be targeted by "not state actors but cyber criminals."
Cameron will label the "failure to manage cyber risk and the failure to take the threat of cyber criminality seriously" as "worrying", and will warn of the evolving ecosystem of ransomware, facilitated by the rise of ransomware as a service (RaaS).
"As the business model has become more and more successful, with these groups securing significant ransom payments from large profitable businesses who cannot afford to lose their data to encryption or to suffer the downtime while their services are offline, the market for ransomware has become increasingly 'professional'," she will say, adding that cyber criminals sometimes offer "the services of a 24/7 help centre to quickly pay the ransom and get yourself back online" or "research your cyber insurance policy to see if you are covered to pay ransoms".
"The cyber insurance industry [...] has a role to play in bearing down on the payment of ransoms and cryptocurrencies entities who facilitate suspicious transactions," she will say.
Last week, the FBI reiterated "that companies should not pay the ransom for a number of reasons", following JBS Foods and Colonial Pipeline making multimillion-dollar payments to ransomware hackers to get their systems back online.
Cameron is also expected to emphasise the importance of international collaboration:
RELATED RESOURCE
Defend your organisation from evolving ransomware attacks
Learn what it takes to reduce risk and strengthen operational resiliency
"UK cyber resilience is not just a UK challenge," she will say. "This is a global challenge and we cannot do this alone. We must continue to deepen our relationships with partners around the world in support of our mutual resilience."
The speech is to come days after the announcement of a new partnership between the UK and US which will create new jobs within the technology and science sector, as well as increase the cyber security and safety of UK and US citizens.
-
The unseen risk in Microsoft 365: disaster recoveryBusinesses that assume they’re covered for data backup could come unstuck in a time of crisis
-
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's prediction about AI in software development is nowhere nearly to becoming a realityNews In March, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed up to 90% of code would be written by AI within six months – his prediction hasn't quite come to fruition.
-
Prolific ransomware operator added to Europe’s Most Wanted list as US dangles $10 million rewardNews The US Department of Justice is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest of Volodymyr Viktorovych Tymoshchuk, an alleged ransomware criminal.
-
Jaguar Land Rover “did the right thing” shutting down systems to thwart cyber attackNews The attack on Jaguar Land Rover highlights the growing attractiveness of the automotive sector
-
Ransomware attack on IT supplier disrupts hundreds of Swedish municipalitiesNews The attack on IT systems supplier Miljödata has impacted public sector services across the country
-
A notorious hacker group is ramping up cloud-based ransomware attacksNews The Storm-0501 threat group is refining its tactics, according to Microsoft, shifting away from traditional endpoint-based attacks and toward cloud-based ransomware.
-
Security researchers have just identified what could be the first ‘AI-powered’ ransomware strain – and it uses OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b modelNews Using OpenAI's gpt-oss:20b model, ‘PromptLock’ generates malicious Lua scripts via the Ollama API.
-
Data I/O shuts down systems in wake of ransomware attack
News Regulatory filings by Data I/O suggest the costs of dealing with the attack could be significant
-
Average ransom payment doubles in a single quarterNews Targeted social engineering and data exfiltration have become the biggest tactics as three major ransomware groups dominate
-
BlackSuit ransomware gang taken down in latest law enforcement sting – but members have already formed a new groupNews The notorious gang has seen its servers taken down and bitcoin seized, but may have morphed into a new group called Chaos
