In today’s digital era, major cyber events pose an unprecedented threat to society and the economy. Yet, there is no commonly agreed-upon and understood system for objectively and consistently classifying these events. This lack of clarity hinders our ability to comprehend the severity and implications of cyber events and prepare and respond to them effectively.

The Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) is an independent body set up to objectively categorise UK cyber events.  The CMC will assess how widespread an event is and its financial impact and use this to categorise the event on a scale of one to five. The categorisation will be made public to allow all those involved in cyber security and cyber response to have a common benchmark.