AI is helping cybercriminals swarm the UAE's financial sector

The UAE’s Cyber Security Council said it successfully fended off a series of cyberattacks targeting the financial services sector, according to state news agency Wam. The attacks used malware and phishing campaigns to target tech infrastructure and digital systems, Wam said.

The damage? Not much, the council says. The attacks were apparently “contained in accordance with the country's national cybersecurity protocols, limiting their impact and preserving the stability of the UAE's digital ecosystem.”

What about the ADCB outage? It’s unclear what has caused the outage that affected Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB) services until last night, as far as we heard from several customers affected. The bank said the outage was down to “essential system maintenance” and didn't give a timeline or a specific reason. Internet banking is back up though, ADCB said on Friday.

Cyberattacks have been on the rise since the start of the war, with Cyber Security Council Head Mohamed Al Kuwaiti saying that the Emirates was facing 800k cyberattacks a day in April. Dow Jones research wrote that Iran-linked groups had increasingly been targeting critical facilities, including Fujairah Port, as a deterrent against involvement in the war.

But this isn’t exactly new. “Cyberattacks aren’t anything new to the region,” Director of Financial Lines at Gallagher Jamie Gee told EnterpriseAM before these latest attacks, flagging that a couple of years ago, the UAE was reported as having the most cyberattacks in the world per capita.

Call it an occupational hazard: The UAE's economic pull works against it here — everyone knows there's a lot of money moving through the Emirates, given the major financial institutions and sovereign wealth funds it hosts, Gee said.

And the exposure keeps growing. Dubai's push into cloud infrastructure is making the city more connected from an IT perspective — which also means more potential points of entry for an attack, Gee told us.

Financial firms aren't the only ones in the crosshairs. Gee flagged large energy, logistics, and utility companies as targets, while healthcare is exposed too: they hold vast amounts of patient data but often lag banks on cybersecurity controls.

Motive spans the spectrum — financially motivated criminals, geopolitically driven actors, and hacktivists making a statement, per Gee. So does method: ransomware, data theft held for ransom, attacks aimed at operational downtime in logistics, direct account intrusions to move funds, website hijacking, and communications interception to divert payments.

The AI-factor: The council flagged that a growing number of attacks involved AI to develop more complex attacks. “Previously, threat actors had slipped up, making layering mistakes like spelling errors or formatting, which were noticeably fraudulent. Now, they’re using AI tools to do it for them, so it’s like a carbon copy of the real communication and very difficult to differentiate between the false and genuine communication,” Gee had told us.

The scale has shifted too: “Where you previously might have had one guy with a laptop going through these fraudulent emails, now they'll have AI-backed programs churning out 100s or 1ks per minute,” he said.

Recovery odds hinge on speed. “The less damage done, the more likely you are to be able to recover your operations or stolen funds,” Gee said, noting the business-continuity fallout an attack brings — impact further down the supply chain is often where the real loss sits.

ICYMI- EnterpriseAM MENA+ recently spotlighted how an increase in AI-powered cyberattacks is putting a spanner in the works for traditional defense systems and triggering a rethink in the way firms respond to attacks, pushing chief information security officers to integrate AI into security layers rather than add it on top.

The bottom line: “Everyone’s going to get hit by one at some point, it’s all about how you [handle] it,” Gee told us, whether through cyber ins. policies, forensic IT, incident response, law fees, and making sure cybersecurity tools and awareness are up to scratch.