Businesses across Britain sign up to Cyber Resilience Pledge as ministers urge firms to strengthen cyber defences

Firms including M&S, Nationwide, ITV, Microsoft UK and Cloudflare are some of the first to pledge to strengthen their cyber defences.

Firms including M&S, Nationwide, ITV, Microsoft UK and Cloudflare are some of the first to Pledge to strengthen their cyber defences 

Signatories will take practical steps to strengthen their cyber resilience, including board-level oversight, use of National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) tools and stronger supply-chain security 

Launch forms a central pillar of the government’s National Cyber Action Plan to raise cyber resilience across the UK economy – with cyber-attacks costing the UK £14.7 billion a year 

More than 60 businesses from every corner of the British economy, and strategic suppliers to government, have committed to strengthen their cyber defences as cyber threats grow in scale, frequency and sophistication.

Set to launch at 10 Downing Street later today (Tuesday 7 July), the new Cyber Resilience Pledge comes as businesses face an increasingly urgent threat environment – with over 5 million cyber crimes committed against UK firms last year - equivalent to 1 every 6 seconds (source: NCSC Annual Review 2025).

Hostile cyber activity in the UK continues to escalate, with the NCSC handling 204 nationally significant incidents in the year to September, up from 89 the year before. The average cost of a significant cyber-attack on an individual UK business now stands at almost £195,000, with the annual cost to organisations estimated at £14.7 billion, excluding wider disruption across the economy (source: Independent research on the economic impact of cyber attacks on the UK). 

The threat is also evolving. While AI provides new capabilities for defenders, it is also lowering the barriers for attackers – by helping them find weaknesses in software, write the code to exploit them, and do so at a speed and scale that would have been impossible even a year ago.