Britain’s cybersecurity agency said Tuesday that artificial intelligence posed a threat to the country’s next national election, and cyberattacks carried out by hostile states and their proxies were proliferating and increasingly difficult to track.
The National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) said “this year we saw the emergence of (foreign) state-linked actors as a new cyber threat to critical national infrastructure” such as electricity, water and internet networks.
The NCSC – which is part of Britain’s cyber espionage agency, GCHQ – said in its annual assessment that the past year had also “emerged a new group of cyber adversaries in the form of foreign-affiliated actors, often sympathetic to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine. They are motivated ideologically, not financially.”
The NCSC said these countries and groups pose a “long-lasting and significant threat,” from Russian-speaking criminals targeting British companies with ransomware attacks, to “Chinese state-affiliated cyber actors” using their skills to pursue “strategic objectives that threaten the security and stability of British interests.”
Echoing warnings from Britain’s MI5 and MI6 intelligence agencies, the NCSC called China’s rise as a technological superpower “an era-defining challenge to British security.” “China could become a major power in cyberspace if our efforts to increase resilience and develop capabilities cannot keep up,” he said.
The report also highlights the threat that rapidly developing intelligence technology poses to elections, including the UK’s national elections due to be held in January 2025.
While Britain still uses old-fashioned voting methods — namely pencil and paper — that make it difficult for hackers to disrupt the vote, the NCSC said deepfake videos and “hyper-realistic robots” will make the spread of disinformation during the campaign more likely. easy. (ab/ka)