Protective DNS now offered as part of NHS Secure Boundary

As part of our response to COVID-19 we are working closely with the NCSC to further support our NHS.  This work will enable us to roll out the Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) – a service aimed at disrupting the use of DNS for malware distribution and operation. It has been created by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and is implemented by Nominet UK.

PDNS is a recursive resolver, which means it finds answers to DNS queries. Management of your own domains (authoritative DNS), is done separately to this NCSC service and will not be affected by the adoption of PDNS.

It is a free and reliable internet accessible DNS service for the public sector and is one of the NCSC’s widely deployed Active Cyber Defence capabilities. It has been mandated for use by central government departments by the Cabinet Office, and in now available to the NHS.

To sign up for PDNS:

• Further support information on PDNS is available on NCSC Website
• Signup for the service directly through the PDNS Customer Portal or via the Active Cyber Defence Hub (see here for other protective services)
  • On-boarding is hopefully simple and intuitive
  • NCSC Services Accounts are granted automatically, but PDNS Access is granted upon manual review so please bear with us.
• We ask customers not to raise support requests with Nominet to allow them to prioritise on-boarding:
  • Please feedback through NHS-D at cybersecurity@nhs.net where queries and requests will be collated and we will find the most efficient way to prioritise and provide support
  • Please do not use the pdnssupport email address, telephone number or portal to raise a ticket unless the query is urgent and in relation to an immediate business resiliency issue

About NHS Secure Boundary

PDNS forms part of NHS Secure Boundary which offers protection against the most sophisticated security threats for NHS organisations. This solution is at the forefront of protecting internet traffic from digital and cloud-based threats, through next generation firewall (NGFW) and web application firewall (WAF) protection.  To find out more about NHS Secure Boundary please email exeter.helpdesk@nhs.net.