Policy · 87 days ago
The shift is from treating UK critical infrastructure as a collection of separate sites to treating it as a contest across shared cloud, supply-chain, and OT environments. The NCSC’s new far/mid/near model says the highest leverage now sits in the shared layers that let attacks spread across sectors before they reach one operator’s perimeter.
That framing comes with scale. The NCSC says it handled 200 cyber incidents affecting UK CNI between June 2025 and May 2026, and about 75% were linked to hostile states including Russia, China, and Iran. It also singled out cloud and open-source supply chains in the mid space, and OT-heavy systems in the near space, as the places where scaled impact is most likely.
The forward risk is that defense pressure moves toward protecting common dependencies, not just hardening individual assets. For cloud-heavy, telecom, supplier-dependent, and OT-heavy operators, compromise of shared infrastructure can now matter across multiple organizations at once.
5 sources covering this story
NCSC’s Horne warns UK infrastructure under sustained cyber pressure from Russia, China and Iran; urges building resilience.
Hostile States Behind 75% of Cyber-Attacks on UK CNI, NCSC Warns
Richard Horne, the NCSC CEO, said three-quarters of cyber-attacks targeting UK critical infrastructure came from nation-state actors
Nation-state rivals linked to majority of consequential attacks targeting critical UK sites
The nation’s top cybersecurity official warned that business leaders, authorities need to rethink how they protect critical infrastructure from state-sponsored adversaries.
The Record from Recorded Future
NCSC CEO Richard Horne warned that “kinetic targeting in any conflict tomorrow will be based on intelligence gathered today” and that nation-state adversaries were “prepositioning” throughout British critical infrastructure.
NCSC CEO: Hostile states linked to three-quarters of cyber attacks affecting UK's critical systems
Dr Richard Horne highlighted the scale of cyber threats against the UK’s critical infrastructure at RUSI’s Annual Security Lecture.
Part of the PlainSec briefing for 2026-06-20