UAE Firms Urged To Rethink Cyber Defences As AI Reshapes Threats

(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) As organisations across the UAE and wider Gulf accelerate their adoption of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity experts are warning that awareness alone is no longer enough to protect businesses from increasingly sophisticated threats.

The message emerging during Cybersecurity Awareness Month is that AI is fundamentally changing both sides of the cyber battlefield, enabling organisations to automate security operations while also giving attackers new tools to scale and accelerate their activities. According to industry experts, businesses must focus on governance, resilience and recovery alongside traditional prevention measures.

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Alexandre Depret-Bixio, Senior Vice President, International at Anomali, said the growing use of autonomous AI systems is forcing organisations to confront difficult questions about trust and accountability. He noted that cybersecurity leaders are increasingly looking to autonomous threat hunting and real-time policy enforcement, but cautioned that poor-quality data can undermine those ambitions.

“If you can't trust your data, you can't trust the decisions AI agents make on your behalf,” he said, warning that organisations risk making“confident but bad decisions”. He added that as reliance on AI-driven alerts grows,“accuracy becomes the discipline every security leader must own”, stressing that autonomy earns trust through governed decision-making and human oversight where needed. He said this challenge is becoming particularly relevant across the GCC as digital transformation and AI adoption accelerate.

The rise of so-called agentic AI is also creating new security concerns. Fady Richmany, Corporate Vice President and General Manager for Emerging Markets at Commvault, said AI agents are operating at machine speed and generating large numbers of non-human identities that require greater visibility and governance.

“Identity recovery is business recovery,” he said. Richmany argued that organisations must move beyond a prevention-first mindset and ensure they can detect threats early, maintain trusted recovery points and rapidly restore operations after an incident.“The conversation must move from 'Can we restore' to 'Can we restore cleanly, completely and with confidence?'” he said.

While many businesses believe they are prepared, experts suggest there is a significant readiness gap. Frank Vukovits, Chief Security Scientist at Delinea, pointed to industry research showing that 87 per cent of organisations believe their identity security posture can support AI automation at scale, yet 46 per cent admit deficiencies in their governance of AI-related identities.

“While organisations might be more cyber aware than ever, far fewer are cyber ready,” he said. Vukovits warned that AI agents are increasingly able to use enterprise access to take actions independently, amplifying existing identity and permissions risks. He added that security awareness programmes must now extend beyond employees to include AI and machine identities, with access granted only when needed and for specific tasks.

Meanwhile, attackers are becoming more efficient. Santiago Pontiroli, Lead TRU Researcher at Acronis, said cybercriminals are increasingly purchasing stolen credentials and authenticated access rather than relying solely on traditional hacking methods.

“The most consequential change in the threat landscape is not one new technique, but how quickly smaller operations can execute the entire attack chain,” he said. AI is accelerating that trend by reducing the time, effort and manpower needed to conduct reconnaissance, develop malicious code and analyse stolen credentials. As a result, he said, organisations must connect identity, endpoint and recovery signals, because“protecting the login is not enough if security controls can be disabled”.

AI is further changing the economics of cybercrime by allowing a single threat actor to coordinate multiple AI agents for reconnaissance, lure creation, code development and credential analysis. As a result, organisations need to connect“identity, endpoint and recovery signals”, because“protecting the login is not enough if security controls can be disabled, and detecting malware is not enough when valid access is already for sale”, Pontiroli said.

For UAE businesses pursuing ambitious digital transformation strategies, experts say the lesson is clear: cybersecurity preparedness must keep pace with AI innovation, with resilience and governance becoming critical pillars of defence.

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