UK Cyber Chief Warns of Unprecedented Rise in Attacks as AI Exposes Old Weaknesses

Britain faces a real prospect of an unprecedented rise in cyber incidents in the coming months, according to Richard Horne, Chief Executive of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Launching the agency's annual report, he will argue the risk is not because AI has invented new ways to attack, but because weaknesses tolerated for too long can now be found and exploited at a scale once thought unimaginable. The warning follows a June alert from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which said the timeline for AI transforming cyber offence and defence is "not years, it is months".

Officials point to the growing number of vulnerabilities being uncovered by vendors as evidence the shift is underway. Major technology providers are now fixing hundreds of vulnerabilities in a single update, and the Linux kernel project patched more than a thousand last month. Experts have not yet seen a matching rise in exploitation. Still, the NCSC says it is "highly likely" that AI-powered malware will be used in a ransomware attack on UK critical infrastructure by 2028, and that China and Russia will routinely use AI in their cyber operations by then.

The report stresses that AI did not create these weaknesses. It is exposing years of technical debt and a failure to put even basic protections in place. Even attacks linked to state-sponsored actors often succeeded through internet-facing applications, using vulnerabilities for which patches existed but had not been applied quickly enough.