The UK is ‘widely’ underestimating online threats from hostile states and criminals, cyber security chief warns

The UK is “widely” underestimating the severity of the threat from cyberspace, the head of the country’s cyber security service will warn. 

It comes as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – a part of GCHQ – revealed there had been a three-fold increase in the most serious attacks compared with a year ago.

Companies, organisations and other parties must immediately do more to bolster their resilience to the evolving risk posed by increasingly sophisticated cyber weapons, enhanced by artificial intelligence, that can be used by hostile states and criminals, the NCSC said in an annual review published on Tuesday.

The gap between the complexity of the attacks and the means to defend against them is “widening” and “will only become more pronounced over time”, it said.

“It is therefore vital we increase our cyber resilience across the whole of the UK, and that we do so with urgency.”

Richard Horne, the new head of the NCSC, is set to give a speech in London in the morning to accompany the launch of the report.

“Hostile activity in UK cyberspace has increased in frequency, sophistication and intensity… We believe the severity of the risk facing the UK is being widely underestimated,” he will say, according to excerpts from the speech that were released in advance.

The cyber centre’s incident management team was required to provide support in response to 430 cyber attacks over the past year – up from 371 in 2023.

“Of these incidents, 89 were nationally significant, 12 of which were at the top end of the scale and more severe in nature (which is a three-fold increase on last year),” the report said.

They included a cyber attack against a company called Synnovis that provides blood testing services to the NHS, which impacted hospitals across London, endangering patients.

The NCSC did not say how many of the gravest attacks were carried out by hostile states but it listed China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as being “real and enduring threats”.

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As for the type of hacks, it warned that ransomware attacks pose “the most immediate and disruptive threat to our critical national infrastructure”, revealing that some state-linked cyber groups are targeting the industrial control systems that infrastructure relies on.

The top sectors reporting ransomware activity in the NCSC this year were academia, manufacturing, IT, legal, charities and construction.

Mr Horne will highlight the advice and guidance that the NCSC publishes to help the public and private sectors, as well as individuals, build up their cyber defences.

“The reality is that advice, that guidance, those frameworks need to be put into practice much more across the board,” he will say.

“There is no room for complacency about the severity of state-led threats or the volume of the threat posed by cybercriminals. The defence and resilience of critical infrastructure, supply chains, the public sector and our wider economy must improve.”