The UAE and Saudi Arabia together accounted for half of all cyberattacks recorded across the Gulf region in the first half of 2026, according to a study by information security research company Positive Technologies.
The UAE was the most targeted country in the region, accounting for 35 per cent of all attacks, followed by Iran at 17 per cent and Saudi Arabia at 15 per cent, the report found.
The first quarter accounted for 96 per cent of all cyber incidents recorded during the first half of the year, with researchers attributing the sharp concentration to a spike in malicious activity during the peak of the regional conflict.
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Many of these attacks were directed at government and state organisations and were accelerated by state actors following the regional tensions earlier this year. Alexey Lukatsky, Chief Evangelist Officer at Positive Technologies, told Khaleej Times on the sidelines of Gisec Global.
He said that the UAE and Saudi Arabia were heavily targeted for their “different companies from IT, from telco, from banks, and so on.”
Most targeted sectors
Government agencies were the most targeted sector, accounting for 27 per cent of successful cyberattacks recorded across the Gulf region, followed by sector-agnostic attacks at 23 per cent. The industrial sector ranked third at 17 per cent, with half of these attacks targeting organisations in Saudi Arabia, according to the report.
Three main attacks
The Positive Technologies chief said they observed that the three most common tactics used by actors in the past couple of years include exploitation of vulnerabilities in software and in hardware, malware, which has been accelerated with the use of artificial intelligence, and phishing through different channels, like email, WhatsApp and other messaging apps.
According to the study, vulnerability exploitation was the primary attack vector in the region, used in 38 per cent of incidents.
This method was prevalent across nearly all the countries covered in the research, which Positive Technologies said may be attributed to the reliance on legacy Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and the relative ease of executing such attacks.
Malware deployment was the second most common method (31 per cent), followed by social engineering (27 per cent).
Source: Khaleej Times