Artificial Intelligence Heightens Ransomware Threat, UK Cyber Security Center Warns

The NCSC’s AI-Cyber Threat Assessment warns that AI is accelerating cybercrime—especially ransomware—by lowering entry barriers for hackers-for-hire and hacktivists, increasing attack scale, speed, and targeting, and inspiring malicious tools like WormGPT and FraudGPT. The report highlights growing global ransomware risk over the next two years, outlines UK and international responses (including £2.6B in UK cybersecurity investment and a 40-country initiative), and urges organizations to strengthen threat intelligence, observability, and workforce training while public and private sectors adopt AI for defense.