UK businesses are set to be protected by new world-leading ransomware proposals to tackle the threat of cybercrime, which is estimated to cost the UK economy billions of pounds every year.
Aiming to strike at the heart of the cybercriminal business model and protect UK businesses by deterring threats, proposals include banning all public sector bodies and critical national infrastructure, including the NHS, local councils, and schools, from making ransomware payments, in order to make them unattractive targets for criminals. This is an expansion of the current ban on payments by government departments.
This is in addition to making it mandatory to report ransomware incidents, to boost intelligence available to law enforcement and help them disrupt more incidents.
The proposals will help the government deliver on its Plan for Change by protecting the public services and infrastructure people rely on from disruption and huge costs.
Security Minister Dan Jarvis said: “With an estimated $1 billion flowing to ransomware criminals globally in 2023, it is vital we act to protect national security as a key foundation upon which this government’s Plan for Change is built.
“These proposals help us meet the scale of the ransomware threat, hitting these criminal networks in their wallets and cutting off the key financial pipeline they rely upon to operate.”
Ransomware is malicious software which infects a victim’s computer and demands a ransom from them in order to give them back access to their system, for their data to be restored, and often for the hackers not to publish the victim’s data on the web.
Carried out largely by Russian affiliated criminal gangs, ransomware attacks continue to pose the most immediate and disruptive threat to the UK’s critical national infrastructure, according to the National Cyber Security Centre’s Annual Review last year. They also cause more disruption and pose a greater risk than other cybercrimes.
