An impression of how the inside of the building where the NCSC's new HQ will be based NOVA/Land Securities

The government's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), based in Victoria, London, has officially be opened by the Queen.

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Headed-up by GCHQ's Ciaran Martin, who has moved from the agency's headquarters in Cheltenham, the NCSC said it has already handled 188 'high-level' cyberattacks against the UK over the past three months.

"The cyberattacks we are seeing are increasing in their frequency, their severity, and their sophistication," chancellor Philip Hammond said ahead of the opening.

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GCHQ will act as a parent body to the NCSC but the new organisation hopes to be more open about its work to help businesses across the UK protect themselves from hackers. While the centre officially opened today, it has been operating since October 2016.

"We will help secure our critical services, lead the response to the most serious incidents and improve the underlying security of the internet through technological improvement and advice to citizens and organisations," Martin said. This will include finding vulnerabilities in public sector websites, stopping spoof emails, and taking down thousands of phishing websites in the UK.


The NCSC was set-up with funding announced by previous chancellor George Osborne. In November 2015, the ex-minister announced £1.9 billion would be made available for tackling cybercrime by 2020. Included in this budget is an undisclosed amount of money for helping to launch cyberattacks against terrorists and other countries.

Ian Levy addresses the audience at the inaugural WIRED Security Tiffany Lin

Ian Levy, the technical director at NCSC, spoke at last year's inaugural WIRED Security conference and said "hackers are not as sophisticated as they believe themselves to be.

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"If you actually look at what [hackers] do, very few of them – a vanishingly small number of them – are actually using advanced techniques. A lot of the attackers we see, including nation states, are using vulnerabilities from five years ago."

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Levy plans to change the advice given to individuals and businesses and wants to introduce domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC) to stop phishing emails on 6,000 government domains.

At the launch of the centre, the chancellor is due to announce a new partnership for the private sector to work alongside the NCSC. "We will invite businesses to second up to 100 employees to come and work in the NCSC – allowing us to draw on the best and the brightest in industry - to test and challenge the government’s thinking as we take this project forward," Hammond said.


This Industry 100 partnership will see the private sector staff joining the NCSC by the end of the 2017/2018 financial year and aims to put industry experts alongside those within government organisations.

It isn't the first public initiative GCHQ has been involved in. In January, along with Wayra UK (part of Telefónica Open Future), the spy agency announced seven startups to be included in its new cybersecurity accelerator.

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