ThreatLocker has announced 10 cybersecurity priorities for UAE organizations as part of Cybersecurity Awareness Month, urging businesses to refocus on cybersecurity fundamentals and strengthen their defenses against an increasingly complex and evolving threat landscape.
Cyberattacks in the UAE aren’t just an IT problem anymore. According to the country’s cyber chief Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, the UAE faced 640,000 attacks in a single day. Between February and August 2026, the country recorded attacks across critical sectors like aviation, energy, finance and education. In September, a hacker reportedly demanded $5 million as ransom from a private-sector organisation.
Danny Jenkins, CEO and Co-Founder of ThreatLocker, said: “October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and while much of the discussion will rightfully be centred on AI, we need to make sure those concerns don’t lead us to lose focus on the cybersecurity fundamentals.
“Most AI cyberattacks still rely on familiar weaknesses like stolen credentials, untrusted software and an allow-by-default approach that lets users and applications do whatever they want unless activity is later identified as a problem.”
This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, ThreatLocker urges UAE organisations to focus on 10 fundamentals:
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Turn on MFA, but do not stop there: Require it for email, cloud applications, remote access and administrative accounts, and pair it with device verification and access policies.
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Make stolen credentials less valuable: Use unique passwords in an approved password manager and eliminate shared accounts.
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Remove local administrator rights: Grant access only to approved people, applications and tasks for the limited time it is required.
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Adopt a deny-by-default approach: Define what is needed and control everything else.
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Do not give trusted applications unlimited freedom: Control how approved applications interact with files, other applications, credentials and network resources.
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Patch the applications attackers are targeting: Keep an accurate inventory of the software in environments to prioritise vulnerabilities that are actively exploited, exposed to the internet or present on critical systems.
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Close unnecessary doors to the internet: Regularly review exposed ports, remote desktop services, VPNs and externally accessible administrative tools. If a service does not need to be publicly reachable, it should not be.
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Keep attackers away from backups: Isolate them from production systems and credentials, control what can reach them and test restoration regularly.
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Prepare employees without making them the only defence: Train staff, but design security around the assumption that someone will eventually click the wrong link, enter credentials on the wrong page or approve the wrong request.
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Practise the response before an incident: Run exercises based on realistic scenarios such as ransomware, credential theft or the compromise of an administrative account.
Jenkins added: “UAE companies should treat ransomware as a board-level issue and act proactively rather than in a middle of a cyber incident. The controls that matter the most are allowlisting, ringfencing and zero trust network access. They can limit what a hacker can access despite entering a system. Don’t make it easy for them.”
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month gets under way, the message for UAE companies is clear: AI may be adding to the number of threats, but it does not necessarily change how they are stopped. Organisations must not overlook the fundamentals of cybersecurity amidst the AI noise.