The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has shared details of its ongoing work to improve the cyber defenses of the NHS.

The NCSC has been working over the past 18 months with organisations across the health sector to improve preparedness and resilience amid heightened cyber risk.

The government organisations has piloted new tools and services for the NHS through the Active Cyber Defence 2.0 programme, as well as promoting the use of NCSC tools and services across the primary healthcare sector.

The NHS has also benefitted from the NCSC’s focus on managing vulnerability disclosures and sharing threat intelligence, as well as efforts to improve visibility to better understand the threat surface and deploy defenses.

The NHS has also adopted the Software Security Code of Practice to ensure software providers are delivering software that is resilient and secure.

Health bodies across the UK’s four nations have been critical in the development of the NCSC’s Threat Hunting Workshops, which bring together cyber experts to tackle threats, develop defenses, and strengthen the defense community.

The NCSC is expanding its defense approach by partnering with UK health organisations to analyse health sector datasets, exploring the connection between baseline data and cyber incident history.

Recommended reading

• NHS App Reforms Cut Waiting Times, While AI Speeds Appointments Up
• NHS Palantir Contract Sparks Push to Prioritise UK Tech Suppliers
• NHS Uses AI to Tackle A&E Bottlenecks
• NHS to Trial AI at ‘Unprecedented Scale’

The NCSC also said that its collaboration with the NHS has led the health organisation to accelerate the wider adoption of passkeys through its use of the security method on the NHS App.

“Taken together, this work shows what is possible when organisations align around a shared goal. Effort is coordinated rather than duplicated, lessons are reused, and risk is reduced across the system, not just within individual organisations,” Nicholas W, National Resilience Directorate for the NCSC wrote in a blog.