MI5 chief warns of threats to UK from Russia, Iran and AI

MI5 is devoting more resource to countering state threats than during the Cold War, the head of the intelligence service has said.Sir Ken McCallum said threats from foreign adversaries had quadrupled in the last decade, with Russia "aggressor number one" as well as increased Iran-linked aggression against Jewish sites and military bases.At an annual speech in London, MI5's chief said Russia was waging hybrid warfare at a time when AI was "supercharging the cyber-security contest between attackers and defenders". He also warned of rising threats from "extreme right-wing terrorism" and said MI5 had "caught terrorists seeking to exploit Al," including by integrating the technology with drones.He said the biggest threat from the misuse of AI was extremist groups using the technology to harness new and existing bioweapons.However, he noted that work countering terrorism and state threats was now "pretty much of equal scale" which he described as a "huge shift" in recent years.Sir Ken said Russia had stopped short of "conventional conflict" against Nato and is instead trying to unsettle European countries while its progress in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine is "minimal and horrifically costly".Hybrid warfare or hybrid attacks are loose terms which tend to describe non-military methods, for example cyber-attacks, sabotage or misinformation, designed to exert pressure and destabilise an adversary.