The National Cyber Security Centre is reportedly planning to list government departments that fail to comply with cyber security measures.

Centre plans to rank government’s email security red, amber or green – Photo credit: Flickr, Tim Green, CC BY 2.0

The centre, which opened for business at the start of this month, wants to encourage government departments to use email security measures, and has said it will set up a dashboard of red, amber and green indicators based on the level of email security.

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The centre plans to make this public so departments can pit themselves against each other, Computer Weekly reported.

The trade title said that the plans were announced by Ian Levy, the technical director of NCSC at a CW500 Security Club meeting in London.

“In six months the dashboard goes public as an incentive for government departments to take action or face being named and shamed,” he is quoted as saying.

NCSC has said that all government bodies must use Dmarc (domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance) protocol set to the highest level.

Using Dmarc protocol helps stop people spoofing GOV.UK domains to send out malicious emails, by alerting the domain owners to the malicious emails and allowing them to take control over their domains.

The centre plans to roll Dmarc out across all 3,258 government domains as part of its active defence programme – which was first revealed by the centre’s leader Ciaran Martin last month.

Computer Weekly reported that Levy said that the centralised system, which processes all the Dmarc reports and automate responses – such as redirecting, or sinkholing, the emails – had closed 50 open email relays in the first six weeks of use.

Meanwhile, the centre has announced that it has certified two more companies to provide cyber security consultancy services to government.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Actica Consulting have joined the group of certified cyber security companies with the accreditation.

The certified cyber security consultancy scheme aims to indicate which consultancy services government and industry can use to protect their information online.

Actica Consulting can provide NCSC-approved consultancy on security architecture, risk management and risk assessment, while HPE can provide risk assessment and risk management.