Help AG State of the Market 2026: UAE Hit by 700,000 Daily Attacks, DDoS Up 857% Since 2019

Help AG, the cybersecurity arm of e& and operator of security operations centres in both Dubai and Riyadh, has released its sixth annual State of the Market Report 2026. The numbers in this year’s report are not directional signals. They are operational realities that GCC security teams are already managing.

The Scale of the Threat

DDoS attack activity increased by 857 percent between 2019 and 2025 across the GCC and EEMEA region. More than 371,000 DDoS attacks were recorded in 2025 alone. The longest observed attack persisted for more than 85 consecutive days, reflecting a shift from short-term disruption tactics to sustained operational pressure campaigns designed to exhaust security team capacity over time.

Attack execution speed has accelerated sharply. In Q1 2026, Help AG observed a 65 percent increase in attack completion speed across its monitored environments, with several major compromises reaching operational impact in under 40 hours from initial access. This compression of the attack lifecycle is the defining challenge for security teams still operating on detection and response cycles built around 24-hour windows.

The geopolitical dimension is measurable. According to the UAE Cybersecurity Council, cyberattack attempts against the UAE surged from approximately 200,000 per day before periods of regional tension to between 500,000 and 700,000 per day during heightened activity in Q1 2026. This is not background noise. It is coordinated, sustained, and responsive to geopolitical events in near real time.

AI Reshaping Attack and Defence

Artificial intelligence has become a defining force on both sides of the threat landscape. On the attack side, AI is enabling adversaries to automate reconnaissance, scale phishing campaigns, accelerate exploitation chains, and refine credential-based attacks with greater speed and precision than any previous generation of tooling.

On the defensive side, Help AG’s SOC environments now operate more than 145 automated security scenarios. Response times have been reduced by over 50 percent compared to manual workflows. Zero-day protections are being operationalised within approximately 45 minutes of identification. These are not aspirational benchmarks. They are documented operational performance metrics from Help AG’s Dubai and Riyadh SOC environments.

The report also identifies defensive learning, the continuous transformation of incident intelligence into improved detection and response performance, as a defining capability of mature SOC operations and a critical mechanism for addressing persistent cybersecurity talent constraints across the region.

Sovereignty as Security Architecture

Cyber sovereignty is emerging as a structural force reshaping how digital infrastructure is built and operated across the GCC. What began as a compliance and data residency conversation has become a security architecture imperative. Sovereign cloud and locally governed infrastructure models are now central to operational resilience strategies in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, driven by cybersecurity requirements, regulatory alignment, and infrastructure continuity planning simultaneously.

The UAE’s advancing digital government agenda places AI and sovereign digital infrastructure at the centre of how public services are delivered and secured. This redefines cybersecurity as a continuous operational layer underpinning critical infrastructure, citizen data protection, and public-sector resilience.

Post-Quantum on the Planning Horizon

Alongside immediate operational threats, the report highlights post-quantum security as an emerging long-term infrastructure priority. As quantum computing advances, current cryptographic standards underpinning identity systems, financial infrastructure, and secure communications may face disruption. Organisations building sovereign digital ecosystems for multi-decade horizons are moving post-quantum readiness from theoretical discussion to active strategic planning.

Five Structural Shifts

Help AG identifies five key directional shifts shaping GCC cybersecurity strategy for 2026 and beyond:

• From fragmented tools to integrated resilience architectures.
• From reactive defence to continuously adaptive, AI-driven operations.
• From compliance-led programmes to measurable operational resilience.
• From talent-centric models to automation and institutional learning.
• From isolated national frameworks to coordinated GCC-wide resilience alignment.

For GCC CISOs, the report translates into three immediate priorities. AI-augmented SOC operations are no longer optional for maintaining detection parity with AI-powered adversaries. Sovereign cloud decisions must be treated as security architecture decisions, not purely procurement choices. Incident response procedures must be tested against machine-speed attack scenarios, not only the slower timelines that most tabletop exercises still model.