Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to invest in technology to defend the United Kingdom against cyber attacks.

The government is taking a multi-faceted approach to driving up the cyber security of the UK economy. Programmes such as CyberASAP, CyberRunway and CyberLocal are supporting the development of new technologies, bringing together expertise in UK academia and industry. Alongside industry, government has funded the Digital Security by Design programme to address memory security bugs, which research from Google and Microsoft suggests accounts for 70% of cyber vulnerabilities. We advocate for the adoption of good cyber security through the provision of best practice guidance, ranging from our recently-published codes of practice on cyber governance, AI cyber security and software development, and via schemes like Cyber Essentials. We are driving up standards in critical infrastructure through the forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill and will publish a new National Cyber Strategy by the end of the year. In the public sector, the Government Cyber Security Strategy (2022-2030) sets a clear target for all public bodies to have technology resilient to known vulnerabilities and common attack methods by 2030. To date we have delivered GovAssure as our new cyber assurance regime and the Government Cyber Coordination Centre to support cross government incident response.