Hostile states are increasingly targeting Britainโs critical infrastructure and were responsible for roughly three-quarters of the most serious cyber incidents handled over the past year, the Governmentโs cyber security chief has warned.
Dr Richard Horne, chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said the UK faces an โongoing contest with capable adversariesโ as Russia, China and Iran intensify efforts to penetrate networks underpinning essential services.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Instituteโs annual security lecture, Dr Horne revealed that hostile state actors were linked to around 75 per cent of more than 200 cyber incidents managed by the NCSC over the last 12 months.
The attacks targeted organisations operating across Britainโs critical national infrastructure, including the energy, healthcare, water and financial sectors.
Dr Horne warned that cyber threats were growing not only in volume but also in sophistication, with adversaries seeking to exploit weaknesses that could prove decisive in a future conflict.
While concerns have grown over the potential use of artificial intelligence to supercharge cyber warfare, he said many successful attacks still stem from basic security failings such as weak authentication systems and unpatched software vulnerabilities.
The warning comes amid mounting concern over hostile activity by foreign powers against Britain and its allies.
Government assessments have previously accused Russia of targeting UK media organisations, telecommunications networks, democratic institutions and elements of the country’s energy infrastructure.
The NCSC chief urged organisations to strengthen their cyber defences by improving authentication measures, accelerating software updates and adopting newer technologies such as passkeys.
His intervention highlights growing fears within Whitehall that cyber attacks are becoming an increasingly important tool of statecraft, allowing hostile nations to probe vulnerabilities, gather intelligence and potentially disrupt essential services without crossing the threshold into conventional warfare.
As tensions rise across Europe and the Middle East, officials are increasingly concerned that the cyber battlefield may become just as important as the physical one.
For Britain’s security chiefs, the message is clear: the threats are already here, and the weaknesses exposed today could become the vulnerabilities exploited tomorrow.
Andy Ward SVP International at Absolute Security:ย โAI in cybersecurity offers huge potential to improve detection and speed up response times. However, AI is also causing cyber threats to become smarter and faster.
“Attacks now move at AI speed, disruption moves at AI speed, and complexity grows at AI speed, so if your resilience doesn’t move at AI speeds, you’ve already lost.ย Our recentย researchย found that 42 per cent of UK organisations still lack a formal cyber resilience strategy. Without robust AI-powered cyber resilience strategies and real-time visibility in place, the UK risks sleepwalking into deeper vulnerabilities.
The NCSC is expected to release further guidance in the coming weeks as part of a broader government effort to strengthen national cyber resilience.
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