Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, by what means the Government ensures the cyber security of its departments, agencies or other public bodies that use websites other than those on gov.uk.

Each department, agency or public body is responsible for managing the cyber security of their own organisation’s internet access, including the use of web filters and security tools. The UK’s cyber security technical authority, the National Cyber Security Centre, provides guidance to departments on how to secure their internet access.

The NCSC has also developed Active Cyber Defence measures some of which are available to the public sector. One measure is DNS (Domain Name System) filtering that blocks registered public sector organisations from accessing sites that are known to contain malware or are fraudulent. As of August 2017, the service is up and running with 44 government organisations actively blocking users from accessing insecure domains.