UAE Faces 800,000 Daily Cyberattacks as AI Spreads

The UAE Cyber Security Council reported more than 800,000 attempted cyberattacks a day, while experts warned that artificial intelligence is speeding up attacks and autonomous AI agents can bring new security risks.

Cybersecurity risks

Early in the year, daily breach attempts on UAE infrastructure ranged from 90,000 to 200,000 before climbing past 800,000, according to the Council. It logged 128 confirmed incidents involving ransomware, data leaks and website defacement. Positive Technologies put the UAE’s share at 35 per cent of attacks in the region.

“AI has accelerated the cyber attacks dramatically,” Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, head of the Council, said. Global losses from cyberattacks reached $10.5 trillion, or Dh38.6 trillion, in 2024. Forecasts put losses at $15.6 trillion, or Dh57.3 trillion, by 2029.

Security executives said autonomous AI agents make decisions, access data and operate across company systems with little human oversight. Salah Suleiman, Managing Director, South Gulf at TrendAI, said agentic AI is changing how attackers and companies operate. “Every agent becomes a new identity, entry point, and target,” he said, adding that criminals use AI to launch “faster, more convincing, and scalable attacks.”

TrendAI Vision One uses four principles—visibility, intent, control and oversight—and a dedicated AI security layer to govern models and agents. “Securing agentic AI from the outset is essential to building trust,” Suleiman said.

Alexandre Depret-Bixio, SVP, International at Anomali, asked, “What do we allow machines to decide?” He said data quality is central to whether people can rely on automated decisions. “If you can't trust your data, you can't trust the decisions AI agents make on your behalf,” he said. The result can be “confident but bad decisions,” which he called an untenable cybersecurity risk.

Governance and accountability

DXC research cited by Daniel Churches, Director Cybersecurity, Asia Pacific and Japan at DXC Technology, found that only 47 per cent of organisations have fully integrated governance for agentic AI, even as many deploy autonomous tools. “Organisations are effectively scaling risk as fast as they're scaling capability,” Churches said. He called for a shift from reactive defence to “intelligent, proactive and increasingly autonomous security.”

Depret-Bixio urged organisations to establish oversight as they give machines more independence. “Autonomy earns trust one governed decision at a time, with human approval and audit where it matters,” he said.

Justin Henkel, CISO at SolarWinds, described machine identities as an “enterprise control problem,” rather than an “identity access management (IAM) cleanup exercise.” He said every automated actor needs “a defined purpose, bounded authority, trustworthy provenance, observable behaviour and a tested path to revocation.”

Henkel said leaders should track privilege reduction, owner coverage, credential lifetime, the provenance of sensitive actions, stale identity removal and the time required to revoke access. “This is a measurable operating discipline, not a one-time compliance project,” he said.

AI adoption and public systems

Artificial intelligence featured prominently at the 2026 IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok, held last week at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. Discussions covered economic growth, employment and financial stability. Igor Ujhazi, Global Regulatory Technology Specialist and author of the Times of Israel blog post, attended as head of a firm working across public digital systems, regulation and market access.

Ujhazi said AI development had moved faster than the legal and administrative foundations needed to govern it. He described deferred projects, uncoordinated pilot schemes and tools used without proper oversight, saying these can weaken public confidence and administrative effectiveness. Civil servants may be unsure what they can approve, he wrote, while citizens may not know who is accountable when an automated decision goes wrong.

Kristalina Georgieva compared AI’s pace of development to a racing car that needs protective barriers, Ujhazi wrote. He argued that safeguards should establish who may introduce a system, which decisions need human review, how performance is assessed and how people harmed by errors can seek correction. He also identified privacy, cybersecurity, data retention, vendor access and documentation for independent examination as issues that law should cover.

The report said attackers already use AI at scale and warned that organisations deploying agents faster than they govern them can create openings for criminals. Depret-Bixio said, “The near-term future of AI will be judged by whether we can stand behind every decision it makes.”