Hostile states linked to 75% of UK critical cyber incidents

The head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has revealed that three-quarters of cyber incidents affecting the country’s critical national infrastructure over the past year are linked to hostile state actors. Richard Horne, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London on June 17, said the agency managed more than 200 such incidents between June 2025 and May 2026, with approximately 75 percent attributed to nations including Russia, China, and Iran.

Horne framed cybersecurity as a continuous contest rather than a static risk to be managed. He warned that adversaries are actively preparing for potential future conflicts by prepositioning within critical systems today. This tactic, he said, could enable rapid exploitation to cause mass disruption. He cited the Chinese state-linked campaign known as Volt Typhoon, which infiltrated U.S. digital infrastructure, as a significant example of such intelligence gathering, which he stated would inevitably inform kinetic targeting in any conflict.

A major accelerant of this threat, according to Horne, is artificial intelligence. He said frontier AI models are already effective at discovering long-standing vulnerabilities...