Cybersecurity Policy Report, Collective Defense Can Counter Hostile Nations’ Cyber Attacks, U.K.’s Cyber Chief Says, (Jun 18, 2026)
Adversarial foreign nations were behind 75% of the cyber attacks affecting critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the United Kingdom in the past year, according to Richard Horne, chief executive officer of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre, who emphasized the importance of collective defense.
“Between June last year and this May, we managed more than 200 incidents impacting organisations within our CNI and supporting ecosystem. And of those incidents, 75% were believed to be linked to state actors,” Mr. Horne said yesterday in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute.
“It’s easy, especially for businesses, to slip into the mental trap of ‘well what can we really do’ and to accept the inevitability of catastrophic events. I would argue that while breaches are inevitable, catastrophic impacts need not be,” he said, according to a transcript of his remarks.
He warned that technological changes, including artificial intelligence and cloud computing, have made cyber defense more complicated but said collaboration was the best approach.
“The truth is that in this great contest there are no spectators, we are all on the pitch. From boardrooms to IT help desks, to sofas at home, to operations and partners abroad the contest is everywhere,” Mr. Horne said. “If we collectively embrace the contest, understand the urgency and believe we can be a match for any opponent, then we can and will prevail.”
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