Digital Transformation Consulting

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) faced a significant challenge due to a dramatic increase in cyber-attacks in the UK, with incidents tripling in 2024 compared to the previous year. This surge posed serious threats to public institutions, as half of UK businesses and a third of charities reported experiencing cyber breaches or attacks. The existing Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) was insufficient to handle the growing threat landscape, particularly as many attacks exploited vulnerabilities in the domain name system (DNS), redirecting users to malicious sites.

To address these issues, the NCSC partnered with Accenture and Cloudflare to develop a scalable and agile PDNS platform aimed at enhancing threat detection and protection for public sector organizations. The new system was designed to filter out billions of low to medium severity risks, allowing security teams to concentrate on more critical threats. The implementation involved transitioning over 8 million UK public sector users to the new platform without disrupting critical operations. This was achieved through advanced AI for real-time threat detection and extensive communication with over 1,000 organizations to prepare them for the transition.

The results of this initiative were substantial. In the first month after the new PDNS went live, it analyzed 100 billion queries and blocked 350 million cyber threats. Over the first six months, the system blocked a total of 2 billion threats. Additionally, the new PDNS is projected to prevent average annual losses of at least £59 million, demonstrating its effectiveness in safeguarding public sector organizations. The system's scalability ensures that it can manage trillions of queries annually, paving the way for a safer digital environment in the UK.