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.