Ransomware attacks will increase in both volume and impact over the next two years due to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, British intelligence has warned. In an all-source intelligence assessment published on Wednesday — based on classified intelligence, industry knowledge, academic material and open source — the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said it was “almost certain” about the increase, the highest confidence rating used by British intelligence analysts. Experts at NCSC, a part of the cyber and signals intelligence agency GCHQ, warned that AI tools were going to benefit different threat actors unevenly. At present, generative AI is already being used to create a “capability uplift in reconnaissance and social engineering” making both of these tasks “more effective, efficient, and harder to detect.” AI is also considered likely to assist with “malware and exploit development, vulnerability research and lateral movement by making existing techniques more efficient.” The good news according to the intelligence experts is that these more sophisticated uses of AI to enhance cyber operations are only likely to be available to the best resourced threat actors, and even then are “are unlikely to be realised before 2025.” One of the limitations on the use of AI tools for sophisticated hacking is the need for the developers to have access to high-quality exploit data to train their models. Currently, it is only a realistic possibility “that highly capable states have repositories of malware that are large enough to effectively train an AI model for this purpose.” “To 2025, training AI on quality data will remain crucial for its effective use in cyber operations. The scaling barriers for automated reconnaissance of targets, social engineering and malware are all primarily related to data,” the assessment explained.

Full threat assessment : The UK NCSC releases an all-source intel assessment warning that ransomware attacks will increase in both volume and impact over the next two years due to AI.