The GCC Ransomware Threat Report 2026: What Enterprise Security Teams Must Know

Ransomware did not slow down in 2025. It accelerated.

GuidePoint's Research and Intelligence Team documented 7,515 publicly posted ransomware victims across 2025 (a 58% year-over-year increase) claimed by a record 124 distinct named groups. That works out to an average of 20.6 victims posted every single day of the year. For enterprise security teams across the GCC, this is not an abstract global statistic. The Gulf's rapid digital transformation, high concentration of critical infrastructure, and position as one of the world's most strategically significant economic regions have placed it squarely in the crosshairs of the groups driving those numbers.

This report draws on data from GuidePoint's 2026 Annual Ransomware and Cyber Threat Report, Cyble's GCC threat intelligence, Microsoft's Middle East security analysis, and Group-IB's regional findings to give GCC enterprise security teams the clearest possible picture of what they are facing in 2026 and what must change in how they defend against it.

The global picture: a 58% surge with no sign of slowing

Before examining the GCC specifically, the scale of the global shift needs to be understood in full.

2025 marked the fourth consecutive year of record ransomware activity, and it was not a close race. Every quarter of 2025 outpaced the equivalent quarter of 2024 by observed victim volume. Q1 2025 alone registered 2,063 victims, more than double the 1,023 seen in Q1 2024. Q4 2025 closed the year with the highest quarterly total ever recorded by GuidePoint, shattering a record that had stood for less than six months.

The number of active groups driving this activity also reached a record high: 124 distinct named groups observed across the year, a 46% increase from the 88 active in 2024. CipherCue's analysis of 7,655 ransomware claims between March 2025 and March 2026 found that Qilin alone posted across 74 countries. The reach of these groups is genuinely global, and the GCC is not insulated from it.

The consolidation shift of early 2026 is also significant for defenders. After two years of fragmentation, the ransomware ecosystem is reconsolidating. By Q1 2026, the top ten groups accounted for 71.1% of all victims (the highest concentration since Q1 2024) with Qilin, Akira, The Gentlemen, and LockBit collectively claiming 41% of all observed victims. This consolidation means fewer, more operationally mature groups are running more sophisticated, higher-impact campaigns. For GCC enterprise security teams, this raises the capability baseline of the threat they are managing.

The GCC is a high-value target (and attackers know it)

The data on GCC-specific targeting is unambiguous.

Microsoft's security analysis for the first half of 2025 placed the UAE ninth globally and second in the Middle East and Africa for frequency of customers impacted by cyber activity, accounting for approximately 11.7% of affected customers in the region. Saudi Arabia ranked 23rd globally and fifth in the Middle East and Africa, accounting for roughly 5.6% of affected customers. In 80% of the incidents Microsoft investigated, attackers were seeking to steal data, driven more by financial gain than intelligence gathering.

Group-IB's High-Tech Crime Trends 2025 report recorded a 44% increase in underground recruitment efforts by ransomware affiliates globally, with significant escalation in GCC-targeted activity specifically. UAE public sector organisations face 50,000 cyberattack attempts daily. Ransomware operations against UAE enterprises increased 32% in 2024 alone, according to Cyble's analysis. In Saudi Arabia, manufacturing accounted for 25.41% of ransomware incidents, reflecting the sector's digital exposure as Vision 2030 infrastructure investments accelerate across the Kingdom.

Cyble's GCC dark web monitoring identified over 90 cases of leaked GCC-related data on underground forums and marketplaces in the first half of 2025. These are not compromised consumer records. They are enterprise data sets (customer databases, financial records, operational system credentials) extracted in double-extortion campaigns and used as ongoing leverage.

Cyble's analysis of the GCC banking sector further identified an average of 16 software supply chain threats targeting the region per month between October 2024 and May 2025. Rather than attacking financial institutions directly, threat actors are compromising the cloud providers, managed service providers, fintech API partners, and software vendors that sit between the attacker and their ultimate target. A single compromised supplier becomes access to dozens of downstream enterprise clients simultaneously.

The groups targeting the GCC in 2026

Understanding which threat actors are operating at scale is essential for GCC security teams building their detection and response programmes.

Qilin is currently the most prolific ransomware operation in the world. In 2025, the Russia-based group claimed over 1,044 victims according to GuidePoint's confirmed data, operating across 74 countries with a geographic reach wider than any other group tracked by CipherCue. Qilin operates an open affiliate recruitment model, enabling high volume at the cost of payment rate. What this means for the GCC is that Qilin affiliates are opportunistic as much as targeted; organisations with weak perimeter controls or unpatched remote access infrastructure are viable targets regardless of geography or sector.

Akira, one of the longest-operating Ransomware-as-a-Service platforms currently active, documented hundreds of attacks in 2025 and had its most productive quarter in Q4 of that year. Akira is notable for its closed recruitment model: it selects experienced affiliates and operates with tighter operational security than Qilin. In 2025, Akira affiliates mass-exploited SonicWall SSL VPN vulnerabilities across the Q3 to Q4 period to drive a surge of attacks. GCC enterprises running SonicWall remote access infrastructure who have not patched the affected versions remain at material risk.

Clop, a data extortion group that abandoned encryption in favour of mass vulnerability exploitation, conducted two major campaigns in 2025: one targeting Cleo managed file transfer software, another targeting Oracle's eBusiness Suite platform. Clop's model is explicitly supply-chain focused: exploit a widely deployed enterprise platform, exfiltrate data from all organisations running it, and use the volume of victims to generate extortion revenue even at low individual payment rates. GCC enterprises running either platform should have confirmed their remediation status.

The Gentlemen, a newcomer that emerged in late 2025 and rapidly rose to second-most-active group in Q1 2026, is of particular concern given its rapid operational maturation. The group's rise to 182 victims in Q1 2026 (from 35 in Q4 2025) signals experienced operators behind the name, likely former affiliates of disrupted groups who rebranded under a new identity. The Gentlemen's FortiGate access stockpile, estimated at 14,700 devices, is of direct relevance to GCC enterprises running Fortinet infrastructure.

How ransomware enters GCC enterprise environments

Dragos's Q1 2025 industrial ransomware analysis recorded 11 incidents across the Middle East, a figure security analysts widely acknowledge as significantly understated due to GCC organisations' reluctance to publicly disclose incidents. The actual attack volume is likely several multiples of reported cases.

The entry vectors being exploited are consistent across multiple threat intelligence sources.

Remote access infrastructure remains the primary initial access route. VPN appliances, remote desktop services, and internet-exposed management interfaces are the most heavily targeted attack surfaces globally and in the GCC. The Palo Alto CVE-2026-0257 GlobalProtect authentication bypass and the FortiClient EMS CVE-2026-35616 exploit (both confirmed active in May 2026) are current examples of exactly the category of vulnerability that ransomware affiliates prioritise. Organisations that have not patched these are actively being probed.

Cloud identity compromise is an increasingly significant vector. The Charter Communications breach confirmed in May 2026 (in which a voice phishing call against a single employee granted access to a Microsoft Entra account, which then pivoted to a Salesforce environment and 4.9 million records) illustrates a pattern that is not US-specific. GCC enterprises using the same cloud platforms are exposed to the same attack chain if their identity security controls are insufficient.

Supply chain intrusion is the fastest-growing entry route for financially motivated threat actors in the GCC. The preference for indirect compromise (through software suppliers, MSPs, and API partners) means that an organisation's own security posture is only as strong as the weakest link in its vendor chain.

Social engineering and authority-based manipulation complete the picture. MuddyWater and Seedworm, both state-aligned groups with documented GCC targeting, use IT impersonation and collaboration platform abuse to establish initial access. These tactics are also in widespread use among financially motivated ransomware affiliates who have adopted the same techniques because they work.

What GCC enterprise security teams must do differently in 2026

The threat data points toward four concrete priorities that distinguish mature GCC security programmes from those still running on compliance-era assumptions.

• Patch velocity on remote access infrastructure must be treated as an emergency response function, not a change management process. When CISA adds a VPN vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue, the mean time between disclosure and exploitation at scale is now measured in days, not weeks. The June 1, 2026 CISA deadline for CVE-2026-0257 is a useful benchmark for GCC organisations to apply to their own remediation timelines.
• Identity security is the new perimeter. The convergence of cloud platforms, federated authentication, and remote work has made identity the most consistently targeted attack surface in financially motivated intrusions. Multi-factor authentication resistant to phishing (hardware tokens or passkeys rather than SMS-based OTP) should be mandatory for all privileged accounts. Conditional access policies that flag impossible travel or unusual authentication geography are no longer optional controls.
• Third-party and supply chain risk requires active programme management, not annual questionnaire compliance. Organisations whose suppliers have access to internal systems or customer data should be conducting continuous monitoring of those suppliers' security posture, not relying on annual attestation documents. The 16 supply chain threats per month recorded across the GCC banking sector in 2025 are a direct product of the gap between how seriously enterprises take their own security and how seriously they take their suppliers'.
• Detection capability must be tuned for post-compromise behaviour, not just initial access. Modern ransomware operations conduct extensive reconnaissance, lateral movement, and data exfiltration before encryption occurs. Organisations whose detection is calibrated primarily to perimeter events will not identify an active intrusion in time to contain it. Behavioural analytics, UEBA, and MITRE ATT&CK-aligned detection coverage across credential use, internal movement, and data staging activity are the controls that catch ransomware campaigns before they reach deployment.

The reality of ransom payments in the GCC

The legal and regulatory environment around ransom payments is shifting in ways that directly affect GCC enterprise decision-making.

Chambers and Partners' 2026 UAE Cybersecurity guide notes that the fragmentation of ransomware groups into smaller, less predictable operators (many of whom are unfamiliar with or indifferent to US OFAC sanctions lists) has increased the legal risk associated with ransom payments for UAE companies. A payment made to a group that is later confirmed to have OFAC-sanctioned affiliations creates exposure that can exceed the original ransom value.

SAMA and CBUAE examiners are increasingly scrutinising incident response capabilities and not just preventive controls. Organisations in the GCC financial sector that pay ransoms without demonstrating that they had exhausted technical recovery options face greater regulatory scrutiny in post-incident examination.

The operational conclusion is that GCC enterprises must invest in recovery capability (tested, validated backups isolated from primary networks, documented incident response playbooks, and relationships with qualified external incident response providers) to ensure that ransom payment is a last resort with legal review, not a first response.

Conclusion: the threat has changed; the response must change with it

The 2025 ransomware surge was not an anomaly. GuidePoint's Q1 2026 data shows underlying growth of 5.3% even after excluding Clop's mass exploitation campaigns. The ecosystem has consolidated around more capable operators. The GCC's continued digital investment makes it a more attractive target every year. And the entry vectors (remote access vulnerabilities, cloud identity compromise, supply chain intrusion) are precisely the attack surfaces that GCC enterprises have been slowest to harden.

The security teams that will defend GCC enterprises effectively in 2026 are those that have moved from compliance-era thinking (annual assessments, checkbox controls, perimeter-focused detection) to operational security thinking: continuous patching, identity-first architecture, supply chain monitoring, and detection capabilities tuned to catch intrusions that are already inside the network.

The data is clear about what the threat looks like. The question now is whether the enterprise security investment across the Gulf is moving fast enough to meet it.