Research by McAfee discovered that 81% of global organisations experienced increased cyber threats during the Covid-19 pandemic. This threat has also extended to the public sector and has become a significant enough concern to prompt the UK government to launch the nation’s first-ever cybersecurity strategy to help protect public sector bodies from bad actors. A Cyber Coordination Centre is also being set up, with the aim of transforming the sharing of data and cyber intelligence.
Following major incidents such as the cyberattacks on SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Servers, the UK government is going further by taking steps to introduce new measures to enhance British business cybersecurity. Additionally, ransomware threats have impacted on critical national infrastructure, with a major example being the Colonial Pipelines attack in the United States.