Educating organisations to identify threat

Through its extensive training curriculum, the UK National Authority for Counter-Eavesdropping (UK NACE) helps government departments protect against technical espionage and attacks.

UK NACE is one of the UK’s three National Technical Authorities, leading the technical security profession across government. Part of its role is providing training and mentoring to national and international partners.  

In the last year the organisation was awarded funding that has enabled the expansion of its training offer. With this funding, UK NACE can now reach more organisations to educate and provide more technical security advice.  

TEMPEST training

The UK NACE Academy trains attendees to identify TEMPEST threats and deploy countermeasures to combat them in secure environments. TEMPEST is an unclassified short name referring to investigation and studies of compromising emanations.

These are radio or magnetic waves that could unknowingly  result in sensitive data being leaked from an electronic device. If intercepted and analysed, these would disclose the information transmitted, received, handled or otherwise processed by telecommunications or automated systems equipment. 

To close the capability gap within the UK TEMPEST community, UK NACE started the rapid roll out of a suite of critical Tester training courses on behalf of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).  

Senior instructors from the Academy completed a comprehensive skills transfer and agreed training priorities with NCSC.

As part of this training programme, UK NACE experts created a specialised TEMPEST and electromagnetic security research and development laboratory to improve technical capability.  

The training was delivered to several government partners. By training and certifying 12 team members and eight team leaders, instructors restored full TEMPEST capacity to the Ministry of Defence.  

NATO and Five Eyes training

In 2022, UK NACE was awarded funding from the UK’s cross-government ‘Conflict, Stability and Security Fund’.

This investment is being used to build global security and embed world-leading UK technical surveillance countermeasures expertise.

The team is prioritising NATO partners who are most at risk from technical interference and espionage.  

Seven senior UK NACE Academy ‘Technical Surveillance Countermeasures’ experts collaborated to devise a bespoke training package.

The team considered the diverse needs of international students and emerging hostile threats.  

Following this intensive training, countermeasure capabilities in NATO countries have been strengthened, giving them the skills and knowledge to defend against state threat actors’ offensive technical attack.   

This funding has enabled UK NACE to engage with and support multilateral institutions on state threats.  

UK NACE INsights

In July 2022, UK NACE branched out and began publishing their UK NACE INsights publication to key stakeholders.

It aims to provide a lens into the world of UK NACE and educate readers on technology safety and protecting data. It helps to demystify the world of technical espionage in a short form.  

The monthly publication covers a wide range of topics, from looking at emerging areas of technology, and explains some tools and techniques of the trade using case studies.  

In January 2023, the team published a piece called ‘Are your devices spying on you?’ following the Christmas break when many people were likely to have new tech gadgets to play with.

The article covered the need to keep up to date with the latest security for your device, being aware of fake updates, and gave top tips on protecting your personal data.  

The UK NACE team has another busy year ahead continuing to provide guidance, education and operational support to the UK government and Friendly Foreign Governments across the world.  

The challenge continues.