Sophos Incident Response Achieves NCSC Certified Incident Response (CIR) Level 2 Status

• 15 May 2024
• TM Team
• 0 Comments

Sophos, a global leader of innovative cybersecurity solutions that defeat cyberattacks, announced that its Incident Response service has been awarded U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Incident Response (CIR) Level 2 status by CREST. This assurance confirms that amid the sophisticated cybersecurity threat landscape, Sophos has the experience and capabilities to deal with incidents caused by financially motivated criminals, such as business email compromise (BEC) attacks and ransomware.

Part of the U.K.’s intelligence and cyber agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the NCSC provides support to the public and private sector to tackle and minimize the impact of security threats.CIR Level 2 accredited organizations must have the capability to support cyber incident response for most private sector organizations, including smaller public sector organizations, charities, local authorities, and organizations that predominantly operate in the U.K.

“The threat landscape is constantly shifting, and cybercriminals are continually refining their tactics and tools to inflict damage. In our latest 2024 Threat Report, we uncovered that the number of ransomware attacks that involved remote encryption increased by 62% in the last year, making it increasingly challenging for defenders to keep organizations safe.

“This accreditation is a real testament to Sophos’ Incident Response work fighting adversaries who are responsible for ransomware, malware, exploits, phishing and a wide range of other sophisticated cyberthreats to rescue organizations in the heat of active attack recover faster,” said Peter Mackenzie, Director of Incident Response, Sophos.

“As a delivery partner for the NCSC’s Cyber Incident Response (Level 2) scheme, we are delighted to congratulate Sophos for gaining Assured Service Provider status,” said Rowland Johnson, president of CREST. “This means Sophos has been assessed as capable of supporting most organizations with common cyberattacks, such as ransomware. It provides valuable assurance to buyers of the high quality of Sophos' incident response services.”

Gerard Allison, senior vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa, Sophos added: “Achieving the Level 2 Certified Incident Response (CIR) certification is a major milestone for Sophos and its channel partners. Sophos is unique as it provides its partners and MSPs with real-time and historical data insights, information and understanding of attacker behaviors from its Sophos X-Ops unit, with this knowledge then built into our product portfolio, from Managed Detection and Response (MDR) to Sophos Central and Intercept X. This insight and visibility means that all of security products and services are integrating and sharing intelligence, creating strong defenses for our customers.”