6 March 2026
Due to incident reports it has received, the NCSC is advising customers to be increasingly alert for denial of service and brute forcing activities.
NCSC Director of Cyber Defence Operations, Emma Bickerstaffe said the NCSC knows there can be an increase in malicious cyber activity as a consequence of geo strategic conflict.
“We are seeing a similar trend in the context of the situation in Iran.
“In particular we are receiving reports of increased brute forcing and low-level denial of service activities,” Dr Bickerstaffe said.
Denial of service is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming the service with more traffic than it can handle.
Brute forcing is a method that systematically tries all possible passwords or encryption keys until the correct one is found, exploiting weak credentials through automated, repetitive guessing to gain unauthorised access to systems or data.
“We have reached out to organisations to recommend they harden their defences against these threats and monitor for anomalous activity on their networks.
“We are also encouraging organisations to report any activity to us.
This will help support NCSC's response to these events and improve our understanding of the overall cyber threat picture,” Dr Bickerstaffe said.
Below is a list of advice that will help prevent and mitigate these threats: