UAE Cyber Security Council Thwarts Sophisticated Attacks on Financial Sector

The UAE's Cyber Security Council (CSC) has confirmed it successfully thwarted a series of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting entities in the financial sector, containing their impact and preserving the continuity of financial services across the country.

What the attacks involved

According to the Council, the attempts included efforts to target digital systems and critical technology infrastructure, run advanced phishing campaigns, exploit security vulnerabilities and deploy malware. The Council said attackers increasingly relied on artificial intelligence to make their techniques more sophisticated and harder to detect.

Scale of the threat

The UAE faces more than 800,000 cyberattack attempts daily, a figure the Council says continues to climb. Yahya Kassab, Senior Director and General Manager for KSA and the Gulf at Commvault, suggested the true volume is likely even higher once unreported incidents across industry are accounted for. Kassab noted that economies furthest along in digital transformation, a category the UAE sits firmly within, tend to draw the highest concentration of attacks.

Why AI is changing the threat model

Jamie Gee, Director of Financial Lines at Gallagher, has pointed to a shift in how convincing these campaigns have become. Where attackers previously left tell tale signs such as spelling errors or inconsistent formatting, AI tools now let them replicate genuine communications closely enough that distinguishing fraudulent messages from real ones has become significantly harder. The scale has changed too, with automated tooling now capable of generating attack attempts at a volume no manual operation could match.

Who is exposed beyond banks

Financial institutions are not the only targets. Large energy, logistics and utility companies also face elevated risk, and healthcare organisations remain exposed given the volume of patient data they hold, often without the same maturity of cybersecurity controls found in banking. Motives span financially driven crime, geopolitically aligned actors and hacktivism, with methods ranging from ransomware and data theft to direct account intrusion and payment diversion through intercepted communications.

What the Council is asking of enterprises

The CSC renewed its call for all entities operating in the UAE to comply with national cybersecurity policies, strengthen preventive controls, keep systems updated, and report suspicious activity through official channels. For enterprise security teams, the practical takeaway is that recovery speed increasingly determines outcome. Organisations that can contain and recover quickly retain far more of their operations and funds than those that cannot.