To check how prepared their organizations are against a potential cyberattack, the UK National Cyber Security Centre has launched a program to scan all internet-connected devices for noted vulnerabilities.
The government agency has mentioned a specific domain and IP address from where all its scan requests will originate and will log the data for device and bug information every time. These reports will be used to analyze and understand their defense capabilities.
Scanning All The Exposed Devices
In an intriguing act, the UK GCHQ-led intelligence agency – National Cyber Security Centre, has launched a program to scan the internet for exposed devices with certain vulnerabilities. Well, it’ll curate all these scans for those organizations residing in the UK to check their cyber integrity and calculate their preparedness for a cyberattack.
As per it, the government agency will make connection requests to servers and individual devices of all the concerned organizations and will log any responses received from them, like the date, time, and IP addresses.
It’ll then analyze these recorded responses with any reported software versions with critical bugs and may warn the concerned organization to patch. Well, the primary motive of this program is to make a stat of how well their local companies are protected.
The agency said these scans are similar to how private cybersecurity firms track vulnerabilities and will increase in their complexity over time. This would help the agency to report more at the CYBERUK conference, scheduled in April next year.
The agency mentioned its IP addresses – 18.171.7.246 and 35.177.10.231, and the domain – scanner.scanning.service.ncsc.gov.uk, from where the scanning requests will originate from.
These requests will also include an identifying header too, for easy spotting. As we prepare for the mass scanning, anyone can email the agency at [email protected] to request to exclude certain IP address scanning.
