More than half of the cyberattacks in the Middle East now trace back to a single motive: money. In its 2025 Digital Defense Report, Microsoft found that 52 percent of cyberattacks worldwide with a known motive were driven by extortion and ransomware, while state-sponsored espionage accounted for just 4 percent. The people attacking UAE organizations are, overwhelmingly, criminals looking to get paid, and regulated sectors hold exactly what they are after: money, identities, and health records.
The numbers behind that shift are steep. The UAE Cyber Security Council reported that ransomware attacks in the country rose 32 percent year on year in 2024, and that ransomware targeting the financial sector surged 65 percent. In July 2026, the Council confirmed it had thwarted a wave of sophisticated attacks aimed at financial-sector entities. For a bank, an insurer, a hospital, or a utility, this is not background noise. It is a direct and rising threat to the systems a regulator expects to be protected.
Every regulated business answers to two audiences
What makes cybersecurity different in a regulated sector is that the damage does not stop at downtime. A regulated business answers to two audiences at once: the attackers trying to get in, and the regulators who expect proof that they could not. Under the UAE Information Assurance Regulation, the Personal Data Protection Law, the Central Bank of the UAE’s standards, and the regimes run by the free-zone regulators in the Dubai International Financial Centre and Abu Dhabi Global Market, a regulated organization is expected to protect specific data, prove it has done so, and report quickly when something goes wrong. Being ready for one audience is not being ready for the other, and security here is not a discretionary investment. It is a condition of the licence to operate.
That raises the cost of getting it wrong. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report put the average breach in the Middle East at 7.29 million US dollars, second only to the United States among the sixteen countries and regions studied, with lost business as the single largest cost category. In a regulated sector, that figure sits on top of regulatory scrutiny, mandatory disclosure, and the loss of customer trust that follows a public incident.
The readiness gap is the real exposure
If the threat is this clear and the obligations this strict, the natural assumption is that regulated organizations are ready. The evidence says otherwise. In Cisco’s 2025 Cybersecurity Readiness Index, only 11 percent of UAE organizations reached the Mature stage of readiness. That is a genuine improvement, more than double the 5 percent of a year earlier, and well ahead of the 4 percent global average, but it still means that roughly nine in ten organizations are not yet where they need to be.
The same study shows why. Ninety-three percent of UAE firms surveyed said they had experienced an AI-related security incident in the past year, and 75 percent expect a business disruption from a cybersecurity event within the next two years. The attackers are already using AI to move faster; readiness has not kept pace.
In our work with regulated organizations across the UAE, that gap usually comes down to three questions a board cannot yet answer with confidence. Could you keep an attacker away from your regulated data tonight? Could you prove your controls to your regulator tomorrow? And would you catch an incident at three in the morning on a public holiday, in time to meet your notification deadline? None of these are questions about a single product. They are questions about whether protection, compliance, and response work together as one system, and the mature few can answer yes three times.
What resilient, compliant security looks like
When cybersecurity genuinely holds up in a regulated sector, three capabilities are working together, one for each of those questions. This is where Al Rostamani Communications builds, alongside the technology partners whose research maps the threat.
The first yes is protection that prevents. Our Network and Cloud Security, Identity and Access Management, Data Security and Encryption, and Critical Infrastructure Security practices reduce the ways an attacker can get in and limit what they can reach once inside. That is what keeps an attacker away from regulated data tonight.
The second yes is compliance that can be proven. Our Risk and Compliance practice aligns controls to the regulations that govern each sector and, with SIEM and XDR, produces the audit-ready visibility a regulator asks for. In a regulated environment, being secure is not enough; you have to be able to demonstrate it tomorrow, on request.
The third yes is response that never sleeps. Our 24/7 Security Operations Centre, delivered under Managed Services, monitors regulated environments around the clock so that an incident is detected in minutes rather than discovered days later, and so notification obligations can be met on time. IBM’s research puts the global average time to identify and contain a breach at 241 days; in a regulated sector, that gap between breach and detection is where both the financial and the regulatory damage compound.
As a trusted partner of leading global technology providers, and with more than 23 years securing operational technology for over 400 enterprise clients in the UAE, we bring protection, compliance, and response together as one system. In a regulated sector, that is what turns security from a cost the board questions into the licence that keeps the business running.
Start with what a regulator would ask first
The organizations in that mature 11 percent did not get there by buying more tools. They got there by knowing which data they were accountable for, proving their controls, and being able to respond the moment something moved.
That clarity is easier to reach than it looks, and it starts with one honest question. If your regulator walked in tomorrow and asked you to prove how you protect, monitor, and would recover your most sensitive data, how much of the answer could you give today?
Al Rostamani Communications helps UAE regulated organizations protect sensitive data, prove compliance, and respond to threats around the clock, from identity and critical-infrastructure security to a 24/7 Security Operations Centre. Talk to us at arcuae.com.