NCSC warns AI-powered ransomware is likely to hit UK critical infrastructure by 2028

The 2028 warning

The assessment is a forecast, not a post-mortem. The NCSC frames it as a warning about where the threat is heading. It is not a report of an attack that has already happened.

For the people who run hospitals, grids, water plants and school networks, the change is about speed. Automation could let attackers probe more targets, write malicious code faster and run operations at a scale that stretches small security teams. Nothing in the review says an AI-driven ransomware attack on UK infrastructure has occurred.

The agency says criminals are likely to use AI to make ransomware operations, social engineering and vulnerability exploitation faster and cheaper. It expects attackers to repurpose open-source tools built for legitimate security research. That would let them automate work they already do by hand.

The review separately says China is best positioned to use advanced AI capabilities against critical infrastructure and other strategic targets. That is a state-threat assessment. It is separate from the ransomware forecast about criminal use of AI.

A suspected agentic loop

Bitdefender researchers believe a 3AM ransomware affiliate may have used AI-generated commands and an automated agentic loop against a school estate in the UK. The attacker encrypted around 37 of nearly 50 machines reached from an unmanaged host.

The conclusion rests on behaviour, not on captured tooling. The commands repeated with slight modifications at each attempt. They came at roughly regular intervals of 40 to 100 seconds. To the researchers, that looked like an agentic loop. Bitdefender said it could not access the machine the attacker worked from. So it could not document the language model. It also could not say whether the model ran locally or remotely. Nor could it say whether a person copied instructions between the implant and the model.

The intrusion spanned 10 to 19 September. Bitdefender could not establish how the attacker got in. Before encrypting, the actor pulled credentials from three Veeam backup servers. It also created two backdoor domain administrator accounts.

Ransomware is already rising

Whatever the role of AI, the baseline is climbing. NCC Group recorded 2,865 ransomware victim claims in the third quarter of 2026. That is up from 2,325 in the previous quarter, a 23% increase.

The monthly picture is less clean. Attacks fell 26% in September to 821. North America recorded 390 and Europe 211. The industrial sector took 29% of quarterly attacks. Qilin stayed the most active group for the sixth consecutive quarter with 365 victims. It was ahead of The Gentlemen on 356 and INC Ransom on 109.

Defence still starts with basics

The NCSC outlined Cyber Shield, an initiative to build an agentic cyber defence ecosystem across government, industry and academia. It plans to work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on a foundational platform. Challenges will test where AI agents genuinely improve defensive speed and reach. The agency acknowledges technical and policy obstacles remain before autonomous defence works at national scale.

Its immediate advice is plainer. Know which systems are exposed. Keep vulnerable software updated. Control access to sensitive data. Plan how essential services continue through an incident.