- Cybersecurity leaders across the Middle East are overhauling their security strategies as artificial intelligence-powered threats become more sophisticated
- Security executives, analysts and vendors say the region is seeing a sharp rise in AI-driven attacks that are harder to detect
- The rapid adoption of AI technologies is changing how chief information security officers set priorities
Cyber security leaders across the Middle East are overhauling their security strategies as artificial intelligence-powered threats become more sophisticated, with deepfakes, shadow AI and advanced phishing attacks forcing organisations to rethink traditional defences.
Security executives, analysts and vendors say the region is seeing a sharp rise in AI-driven attacks that are harder to detect and increasingly capable of bypassing conventional security measures.
Aus Alzubaidi, CISO at MBC Group, revealed in an interview with Computer Weekly that attackers are already using AI-generated audio and video to impersonate executives and authorise fraudulent transactions.
“What once seemed theoretical is now playing out in real operations,” Alzubaidi said.
He added that the most significant shift has been the quality of attacks rather than the volume, with traditional warning signs of phishing and impersonation becoming increasingly difficult to identify.
Roland Daccache, director of sales engineering for the Middle East and North Africa at CrowdStrike, similarly said AI is now accelerating every stage of the cyber-attack lifecycle.
The company’s 2026 global threat report recorded an 89 per cent year-on-year increase in activity by AI-enabled adversaries, according to Daccache.
The rise of AI is also reshaping security operations centres, with growing demand for what Daccache described as agentic SOCs, where human analysts oversee intelligent systems capable of handling investigation, triage and response functions at machine speed.
At the same time, organisations are facing increasing challenges from shadow AI as employees continue to adopt AI tools faster than security teams can evaluate or govern them.
According to security leaders in the industry, the rapid adoption of AI technologies is changing how chief information security officers set priorities, with identity protection, AI governance and advanced threat detection becoming central concerns.
The concerns come as research from Google’s Threat Intelligence Group warned that AI-powered hacking has rapidly evolved into an ‘industrial-scale threat’ that isn’t a new phenomenon.
“There’s a misconception that the AI vulnerability race is imminent. The reality is that it’s already begun,” said John Hultquist, the group’s chief analyst, to The Guardian.
“Threat actors are using AI to boost the speed, scale, and sophistication of their attacks. It enables them to test their operations, persist against targets, build better malware and make many other improvements.”
The report found that criminal groups and state-linked actors from China, North Korea and Russia are increasingly using commercial AI models to refine and scale cyber-attacks.
With the technology being used to both attack and prevent attacks, how can CISOs stop AI from being used as a weapon if they themselves are using AI as a shield?
