Strengthening Cyber Resilience: How NCSC Offers Free Tools through Active Cyber Defence Empowering UK Organisations

Strengthening Cyber Resilience: How NCSC Offers Free Tools through Active Cyber Defence Empowering UK Organisations

The NCSC's mission is to make the UK the safest place to live and work online. As part of this mission, the NCSC defends the UK's digital society and empowers organisations to improve their cyber resilience, to proactively protect themselves as cyber threats grow more sophisticated. According to the UK Government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, 43% of UK businesses reported experiencing a cyber-attack or breach in the past year, yet only 15% conducted a cyber health check or audit. As threats continue to evolve, the need for robust, accessible defences is clearer than ever.

What is Active Cyber Defence?

Active Cyber Defence (ACD) services help you to protect your organisation's critical services from cyber attacks, manage major incidents and improve the underlying security of the internet.

ACD significantly enhances the UK's cyber resilience by providing free, effective tools that help organisations focus their resources on more complex threats, reducing overall risk from high-volume attacks.

Imagine instant self-service security checks, alerts before attacks hit, and expert-backed protection like email security assessments and malicious website takedowns-all at your fingertips. Signing up is simple: choose your ACD services through the NCSC, follow the clear guidance, and start using these free tools to safeguard your business and outsmart cyber criminals today.

Phishing for Facts: What You Need to Know - NCSC 2024 annual review

• Early Warning: Adoption rose 29%. The NCSC flagged 181,180 vulnerable systems and issued alerts for malware infections on 117,700 IPs and 47,739 compromised servers, helping organisations stay ahead of threats. See video here
• Check Your Cyber Security: Usage jumped 82%, with over 33,000 IP checks uncovering 7,300+ vulnerabilities. Of 25,800 browser checks (up 76%), a third found out-of-date browsers, showing how risks can accumulate without proactive monitoring.
• Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS): Since April 2020, over 34.4 million reports have led to the removal of 351,000 scam URLs.

Key ACD Services

ACD offers a robust set of tools and services, including:

Self-Service Checks

These tools allow organisations to proactively assess and improve their own cyber culture:

• Check Your Cyber Security: Instantly assess your cyber security, including email standards, website/IP vulnerabilities and browser updates, without registration.
• Early Warning: Tailored alerts about attacks, vulnerabilities, or suspicious activity, analysing millions of daily data points for thousands of organisations.
• Exercise in a Box: Free online incident response exercises.
• Mail Check: Assess DMARC, SPF, MTA-STS, and inbound TLS policies (with some features discontinued from March 2025). Please see table below for reference.

Detections Deployed by Organisations

Organisations integrate services in this category into their environment to provide a protection or detection capability.

• Vulnerability disclosure: Amongst other services they have a vulnerability disclosure toolkit. Which guides organisations in setting up a clear, accessible process for reporting vulnerabilities. See video here

Disrupt and Defend

These tools and services work to block or disrupt malicious activity before it can impact organisations:

• Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS): Report suspicious emails to help neutralise phishing campaigns.

Why Choose ACD?

• Free and scalable for organisations of all sizes
• Automated, proactive threat detection and mitigation.
• User-friendly, requiring no deep cybersecurity expertise.
• Collaborative and transparent, fostering collective defence.
• Evidence-based, with continual improvement based on real-world data.

Get Involved: Strengthen Your Cyber Resilience Today

Cybersecurity is a collective responsibility. By adopting Active Cyber Defence, your organisation can:

• Reduce its exposure to common cyber threats.
• Build trust with customers and stakeholders.
• Contribute to the overall resilience of the UK's digital ecosystem.

Join the growing community of organisations benefiting from the NCSC's world-leading cyber defence capabilities. Explore ACD today and take a proactive step towards a safer digital future.

Read more: The Next Generation: Active Cyber Defence 2.0

Get ready for a new era in cyber defence. Active Cyber Defence 2.0 (ACD 2.0) is here to shake up the way the UK tackles online threats. Building on years of success, ACD 2.0 promises next-generation tools and services, designed to outsmart the latest cyber criminals and fill gaps the commercial market can't yet reach. This is more than an upgrade: it is a bold call for partnership across government, industry, and academia, with experiments and innovation at its core. Want to be part of the future of cyber resilience? Discover what is coming and how you can get involved.

Sign up Here