UK to get new cyber attack severity rating system A new monitoring centre is to begin rating the severity of cyber events – including cyber attacks – in the UK as they happen, as part of efforts to help firms tackle and learn from such incidents.
From Thursday, the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) will start to categorise cyber events that have a potential financial impact greater that £100 million, affect multiple organisations and where there is data or information available to allow for proper assessment.
“The CMC has the potential to help businesses and individuals better understand the implications of cyber events, mitigate their impact on people’s lives, and improve cyber resilience and response plans.”.
The UK has been hit by a wide range of high-profile cyber events in recent years, from online banking outages to cyber attacks on the NHS and the CrowdStrike IT outage last summer which knocked infrastructure, transport and healthcare systems offline.
It will rate incidents on a scale of one (least severe) to five (most severe), with the technical committee leading the monitoring chaired by former chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Ciaran Martin.
