Artificial intelligence (AI) will almost certainly continue to make elements of cyber intrusion operations more effective and efficient, leading to an increase in frequency and intensity of cyber threats. That’s according to the UK official National Cyber Security Centre’s NCSC Assessment (NCSC-A) of the cyber threat to the UK.
The NCSC predicts a ‘digital divide’, between systems keeping pace with AI-enabled threats and a large proportion that are more vulnerable, making cyber security at scale increasingly important to 2027 and beyond. In the rush to provide a market-leading AI model (or applications more advanced than competitors) the NCSC sees a risk that developers will prioritise an accelerated release schedule over security.
AI-enabled cyber tools will highly likely expand access to AI-enabled intrusion capability to an expanded range of state and non-state actors. AI models and systems across the UKโs technology base, and particularly within critical national infrastructure (CNI), almost certainly presents an increased attack surface for adversaries to exploit, the NCSC says.
It assesses that in the near-term, only highly capable state actors with access to requisite investment, quality training data and expertise will be able to harness the full potential of AI in advanced cyber operations. Most other cyber threat groups are almost certain to focus on the use, or repurposing of commercially available and open-source AI models. In more detail, AI will highly likely enhance zero-day (unpatched, and likely unknown, vulnerabilities in systems) discovery and exploitation techniques to 2027.
For the assessment in full visit the NCSC website.ย The NCSC meanwhile is encouraging all to prepare now for when a โpatch waveโ arrives; a rush of software updates that will need to be applied across the technology stack to address the disclosure of new vulnerabilities.
Comment
Neena Sharma, Product and Customer Marketing Director at Filigran, said: “Frontier AI introduces short-term uncertainty as its general-purpose reach and availability are still being defined. But in security, the market isn’t waiting for those answers. Vendors like us are already shipping agentic AI at pace because security teams have reached a clear conclusion: as AI accelerates the speed of vulnerability discovery and exposure management, the response has to be equally fast. Action-oriented agentic AI workflows aren’t a future consideration; they’re becoming a present requirement.”
Background
In a speech at the CYBERUK conference in Glasgow last month, Dr Richard Horne, the CEO of the NCSC, a part of signals intelligence agency GCHQ spoke of ‘tumultuous uncertainty’.
