Cyber Security and Resilience (Network and Information Systems) Bill (Second sitting)

Kanishka Narayan Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Public Bill Committees

[David Chadwick]

Q Thank you for joining us. You mentioned frauds. It is a fact that criminals across the world are targeting British citizens every day. In Dyfed-Powys, over £500,000 was lost to online fraud in 2023-24, and elderly victims are losing £7,900 a day to fraud. Clearly, these attacks are coming from all over the world. Interpol recently arrested over 800 members of a global criminal network based in Nigeria. From your perspective, how effectively are UK police forces currently able to work with international partners to investigate and prosecute overseas criminals? What additional support from the Government would most improve your ability to mitigate online fraud from overseas?

DCS Andrew Gould: That is a really good question. The international jurisdiction challenge for us is huge. We know that is where most of the volumes are driven from, and obviously we do not have the powers to just go over and get hold of the people we would necessarily want to. You will not be surprised to hear that it really varies between jurisdictions. Some are a lot more keen to address some of the threats emanating from their countries than others. More countries are starting to treat this as more of a priority, but it can take years to investigate an organised crime group or a network, and it takes them seconds to commit the crime. It is a huge challenge.

There are two things that we could do more of better—these are things that are in train already. If you think about the wealth of cyber-crime, online fraud and so on, all the data, and a lot of the skills and expertise to tackle that sit within the private sector, whereas in law enforcement, we have the law enforcement powers to take action to address some of it.

With a recent pilot in the City funded by the Home Office, we have started to move beyond our traditional private sector partnerships. We are working with key existing partners—blockchain analytic companies or open-source intelligence companies—and we are effectively in an openly commercial relationship; we are paying them to undertake operational activity on our behalf. We are saying, “Company a, b or c, we want you to identify UK-based cyber-criminals, online fraudsters, money-laundering and opportunities for crypto-seizure under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002”. They have the global datasets and the bigger picture; we have only a small piece of the puzzle. By working with them jointly on operations, they might bring a number of targets for us, and we can then develop that into operational activity using some of the other tools and techniques that we have.

It is quite early days with that pilot, but the first investigation we did down in the south-east resulted in a seizure of about £40 million-worth of cryptocurrency. That is off a commercial contract that cost us a couple of hundred grand. There is potential for return on investment and impact as we scale it up. It is a capability that you can point at any area of online threat, not just cyber-crime and fraud, so there are some huge opportunities for it to really start to impact at scale.

One of the other things we do in a much more automated and technical way—again funded by the Home Office—is the replacement of the Action Fraud system with the new Report Fraud system. That will, over the next year or so, start to ingest a lot of private sector datasets from financial institutions, open-source intelligence companies and the like, so we will have a much broader understanding of all those threats and we will also be able to engage in takedowns and disruptions in an automated way at scale, working with a lot of the communication service providers, banks and others.

Instead of the traditional manual way we have always been doing a lot of that protection, we can, through partnerships, start doing it in a much more automated and effective way at scale. Over time, we will be able to design out and remove a lot of the volume you see impacting the UK public now. That is certainly the plan.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology (Kanishka Narayan)]

Q One of the things that we have heard over the course of the day is that the Bill is just one of a range of different ways in which public authorities engage with companies on cyber-security and resilience. I am interested in hearing about the impact the Police CyberAlarm programme has had on the cyber-security and resilience of organisations. What would you like to see going forward?

DCS Andrew Gould: I love the fact that you have heard of it. One of the things that we struggle with is promoting a lot of these initiatives. Successive Governments actually deserve a lot of credit for the range of services that are provided. We aspire to be a global cyber-power, and in many ways we are. When you look at the range of services, tools, advice and guidance that organisations or the public can get, there is quite a positive story to tell there. I think we struggle to bring that into one single narrative and promote it, which is a real challenge. People just do not know that those services are there.

For those who are not familiar with Police CyberAlarm, it is a Home Office-funded policing tool focused on small and medium-sized organisations that probably do not have the skills or understanding to protect themselves as effectively. They can download that piece of software, and it will sit on their external networks and monitor for attacks. For the first time, it helps us in policing to build a domestic threat picture for small and medium-sized organisations, because everybody has a different piece of the puzzle. GCHQ has great insight into what is coming into the UK infrastructure, but it obviously cannot monitor domestically. Big organisations that provide cyber-security services and monitoring know what is impacting their clients or their organisation, but not everybody else. At policing, we get what is reported, which is a tiny piece of the puzzle. So everyone has a different bit of the jigsaw, and none of it fits together, and, even if it did, there would still be gaps. For SMEs, that is a particular gap.

For us, we get the threat intelligence to drive our operational activity, which has been quite successful for us. The benefit for member organisations—we are up to about 12,000 organisations at the moment, which are mostly schools, because we know that they are the most vulnerable to attack for a variety of reasons—is that, having the free tool available, it can do the monthly vulnerability scans and assessments. So they are getting a report from the police that tells them what they need to fix and what they need to patch.

We do not publicly offer a lifetime monitoring service, because we would not want the liability and responsibility, and we do not have the infrastructure to run that scale of security operation centre. But, in effect, that is actually what we have been doing for a long time—maybe not 24/7, but most of the time—because we have been able to identify precursor activity to ransomware attacks on schools or other organisations, and have been able to step in and prevent it from happening. There have been instances where officers have literally got in cars and gone on a blue light to organisations to say, “You need to shut some stuff off now, because you are about to lose control of your whole organisation.”

To that extent, it has been really impactful, but the challenge for us is how to scale. How do you scale so that people understand that it is there? How do you make it easier for organisations to install? That is one of the things that we are working on at the moment, so that everybody can benefit from the scans and the threat reporting, and we can benefit from a bigger understanding of what is going on.

The flip side of the SME offer from our point of view is our cyber-resilience centres. By working with some of the top student talent in the country, we can scale to offer our member organisations across the country the latest advice and guidance, help them understand what the NCSC advice and guidance is, and then help them to get the right level of security policies, patch their systems and all that kind of thing. It helps them to take the first steps on their cyber-resilience journey, and hopefully be more mature consumers of cyber-security industry services going forward. We are helping to create a market for growth, but also helping those organisations to understand their specific vulnerabilities and improve from a very base level.

[Bradley Thomas]

Q With regard to ransom payments and extortion attempts, what do you typically see? Is it for monetary gain or intellectual property data—what is the split?

DCS Andrew Gould: That is another really good question. Generally, it is financial, but you will often get what is called the double dip, so there is the extraction of data as well as the encryption of it, so that you no longer have access to it. They might take that data as well, primarily personal data, because of the regulatory pressures and challenges that that brings. There is a sense among a lot of criminal groups that, if they have personal data, you are more likely to pay, because you do not want that reputation, embarrassment and all the rest of it, as opposed to if they take intellectual property, for example. But it is not that that does not happen as well. Primarily, it is financial gain.