Rashmi Arora

Two weeks ago I wrote that the next attack on Britain might not look like the start of a war. It might look like an ordinary Monday morning when everything suddenly stops working. Yesterday it looked like a fridge. Supermarket refrigeration was attacked across seven European countries. Freezers were switched to defrost. In some shops the temperature reached 50C. One Belgian store threw away €100,000 of food. Last month the same method hit hundreds of French supermarkets and millions of euros of stock went in the bin. Britain was hit too, in a small way, according to our own National Cyber Security Centre. The damage this time was spoiled food. That is about as cheap a warning as we are ever going to get. Today the NCSC says artificial intelligence is helping to industrialise these attacks, and that it is highly likely AI will be used against Britain’s critical national infrastructure by 2028. Its chief executive put the cause plainly: Britain has done “tech on the cheap” for decades, and weaknesses we tolerated for far too long can now be found and exploited at a scale that was once unimaginable. We keep a list of what counts as critical national infrastructure. Energy, water, transport, health. Nobody ever wrote down the refrigeration unit at the back of a supermarket. But attackers do not work from our list. They work from whatever is connected, unpatched and forgotten. That is the real warning this week, and it is not really about AI. AI only makes the forgotten things faster to find. The job is to stop leaving them there. Cheap technology is only cheap until it stops working. So let us have a national rethink of what counts as critical national infrastructure. Not a longer list. Just a more intelligent one.