Britain was tallied as the European country most exposed to state-backed and geopolitical cyber threats. The speed and scale of cybercrime are also rising quickly as AI sharply cuts the time needed to prepare attacks, the analysis showed.

Tech news outlet TechRadar cited Microsoft's 2026 Digital Defense Report as saying 76 state-backed and geopolitical cyber activities were observed in Britain over the past year. That was the highest among European countries. Britain also ranked fifth in Microsoft's country-by-country statistics of where its customers were affected by cyber threats, accounting for 3.8 percent of global activity.

Microsoft said, "The spread of AI is lowering the barrier to entry for attackers and compressing attack cycles." It said AI can quickly automate parts of reconnaissance and attack preparation that used to take days, allowing sophisticated attacks to be readied in much less time. Microsoft pointed out that AI is shortening some vulnerability detection and attack steps from "days to seconds."

The effectiveness of existing intrusion methods has also grown. In Microsoft's incident response process, the share of cases in which phishing was confirmed as the initial entry route rose to 23 percent from 7 percent a year earlier. Voice phishing activity also rose 502 percent in a year. The analysis said social engineering is being carried out through voice and video calls posing as colleagues or IT support staff, not just email.

Ransomware detections also increased. They rose 50 percent in the United States, 66 percent in Britain and 276 percent in Germany from a year earlier. Among attacks targeting state and local governments and education and critical infrastructure, academia and research accounted for the largest share at 38 percent, followed by transportation at 22 percent and government agencies and services at 13 percent.

Mike Yeh (마이크 예), corporate vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, said, "In the AI era, beyond blocking individual intrusions, organisations must have the resilience to keep operating even as threats move fast," stressing the importance of public-private cooperation to protect critical infrastructure.