UAE daily cyberattacks rose to 700,000 after February Iran war while drone strikes hit AWS data centers

Daily cyberattack attempts in the UAE rose from roughly 200,000 to as many as 700,000 after the Iran war on February 28, Fortune reported. The UAE’s financial sector faced a wave of sophisticated cyberattacks last week that were thwarted. The country’s Cyber Security Council stated that cybercriminals are increasingly using AI to develop more advanced techniques.

A Help AG report published last month said AI enables attackers to accelerate reconnaissance and adapt techniques in real time. In Q1 2026 Help AG observed that AI use allowed bad actors to complete attacks 65 percent faster than before, with some causing damage less than 40 hours after first gaining access.

The average cost of a data breach in the Middle East reached $7.29 million in 2025, compared with the global average of $4.44 million, according to IBM.

Information security spending across MENA is expected to reach $4.07 billion in 2026, up 10.1 percent from 2025, Gartner projected. Cybersecurity spending across the GCC is projected to surpass $9.6 billion by 2032, up from $5.9 billion in 2025, according to P&S Intelligence.

In early March two AWS data centers in the UAE were directly struck by drones, while one center in Bahrain was damaged by a nearby strike.

The attacks forced three centers offline and triggered outages across banking, payments, delivery apps and enterprise software. The strikes marked the first time military attacks had directly targeted and disrupted the data center operations of a major U.S. tech company.

AWS services in Bahrain have been targeted in further drone strikes since. “Organizations today need security that is continuously adaptive, locally aligned and designed to protect critical infrastructure and citizen data in an AI-driven environment,” said Abdulla Ebrahim Al Ahmed, chief government relations officer at e& UAE.