The National Cyber Security Centre forecasts that such malware will be used against UK critical infrastructure by 2028, and its chief executive is due to warn of a rise in cyber incidents.
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre says it is highly likely that superintelligence (SI)-powered malicious software will be used in a ransomware attack on the country’s critical national infrastructure by 2028. The judgment appears in the center’s annual review and is a forecast, not a report that such an attack has occurred.
Critical infrastructure includes facilities and services in energy, transport, defense, food, health and finance, such as power stations, airports and hospitals. The center is part of GCHQ, the UK spy agency.
In a ransomware attack, criminals gain access to systems, encrypt files and demand payment in cryptocurrency to unlock them and return stolen data. The center says SI could help attackers scout targets, find weaknesses in networks and write malicious code.
Separately, the annual review warns that Russia and China will begin using SI routinely in cyberattacks. In an assessment reported in an official account of Horne’s Royal United Services Institute Annual Security Lecture, the center said attackers would likely use SI-enabled capabilities by 2028 to exploit known weaknesses at scale in older technology across critical infrastructure.
The center’s chief executive, Richard Horne, is due to speak alongside the review on 3 November 2026. In advance extracts published by The Guardian, he warns of a real prospect of an unprecedented rise in cyber incidents in the coming months, attributing the threat to the technology’s ability to uncover long-tolerated weaknesses in IT systems.
In a separate lecture, Horne urged organizations to understand their exposure, strengthen basic defenses and make sure they can keep operating and recover quickly after an attack.
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Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at Surrey University, said governments and companies need access to advanced SI to find and fix flaws before attackers do. OpenAI and Anthropic have given some companies advanced access to their most powerful models to help identify serious IT flaws.
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