The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) offers a free service called Early Warning, designed to alert UK organisations to potential cyber threats. These alerts can help you detect compromises, misconfigurations, or malicious activity affecting your systems.
We're primarily linking directly to NCSC guidance and help pages as the Early Warning system is evolving and growing quickly, so this is the best way to ensure you are receiving accurate and up-to-date advice.
Step 1: Register for MyNCSC
To access Early Warning, you'll need an account with MyNCSC.
Make sure you set up MFA to protect your account!
Step 2: Add other collaborators
If there is anyone else you feel should, or would benefit from, having access to Early Warning, then we can add them now. We recommend at least two user accounts exist for each company, just in case one loses access.
Scroll to the heading "Inviting team members".
Step 3: Adding Assets
For Early Warning to be able to monitor your organisations' services and systems, it first needs to know what to look for. An "asset" in Early Warning is either a domain name (e.g. yourcompany.com), a URL (e.g. www.yourcompany.com/eShop), or an IP address (e.g. 1.2.3.4).
Don't add any assets you don't own or don't have permission to monitor!
If you've added a domain as an asset, you'll need to verify your ownership of the domain:
If you're not sure how to complete the domain verification steps (creating the DNS records), just let us know and we'll add them on your behalf (provided we have access to your domains' name servers).
Step 4: Enable Mail Check
Once you've enabled Early Warning and have added a domain asset, you should enable the Mail Check service. This is a new service from NCSC to review the security configuration of your email services. When you add a domain asset into MyNCSC, you can toggle on the Mail Check service directly from the asset details page.
Step 5: Review Findings
Now you've registered for Early Warning, and Mail Check, what do you do next?
Both services will produce "findings". These could be advisory, or they could be more serious. Findings will show in the "Findings" option of the left-hand menu in MyNCSC, and will be categorised by severity.
You will also get a copy of the findings sent to you by email too.
If you're not sure on what the findings mean, or what to do about them, then get in touch and we'll be happy to assist
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