The Coming Wave: Why AI-Fueled Cyber Crime Demands a New Layer of Risk Management

In June 2024, a ransomware attack on Synnovis—an NHS diagnostics provider—led to thousands of canceled surgeries, long-term patient harm, and yet barely registered in the headlines. A year later, an attack on Marks & Spencer, which temporarily left Percy Pig sweets and Colin the Caterpillar cakes off supermarket shelves, wiped £600 million off the company’s market cap and triggered nationwide panic.

This juxtaposition, as Misha Glenny eloquently observes in his Financial Times Weekend article, reveals something uncomfortable about both society’s perception of cyber risk and our structural ability to respond to it. But it also points to a larger and more pressing reality: AI is about to turn every cyber threat vector into a force multiplier—and the defensive tools most organizations rely on are no longer fit for purpose.

As AI matures into autonomous, agentic forms, we’re not just dealing with more attacks—we’re dealing with smarter, faster, and more scalable ones. The solution isn’t just better cybersecurity. It’s Integrated Risk Management (IRM)—and it must evolve as rapidly as the threat landscape.