Alexandre Depret-Bixio, Senior Vice President for EMEA and APJ at Anomali, discusses how geopolitical volatility is reshaping cyber threat intelligence priorities across the Gulf.
The geopolitical landscape of the Middle East, including the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, continues to evolve. As global alliances are recalibrated and strategic priorities shift, the cyber dimension of these developments becomes increasingly significant.
In the UAE and Saudi Arabia (KSA), governments and large enterprises are proactively enhancing cybersecurity strategies in recognition that cyberspace has become increasingly complex, with nation-state actors, organised cyber groups and hacktivists operating in a more interconnected global environment.
Geopolitical dynamics now define cyber threat environment
Any comprehensive assessment of cyber risk in the region today should recognise that global geopolitical developments can influence attack patterns and motivations. As the global environment evolves, organizations across the region are seeing corresponding shifts in cyber activity patterns. For example, analysts have documented that roughly 27.5% of advanced threats targeting the region are state-backed or state-influenced, reflecting the direct intersection of geopolitical motives and cyber operations.
In practical terms, this means attacks are not simply criminal in nature; they are extensions of political will. Government ministries, critical infrastructure and major enterprises are high-value targets globally due to the critical services they provide and the strategic importance of the sectors they operate in.
The GCC as a high-value cyber target
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are particularly attractive targets. Their roles as economic leaders – Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil exporter and the UAE as a diversified technological and financial hub, mean that any disruption or espionage activity can have consequences not only locally but globally.
For instance, like many highly digitalised economies, organisations in the UAE continue to manage large and dynamic digital footprints, which require continuous monitoring and protection as threat techniques evolve.
Similarly, high-volume, high-impact distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and botnet campaigns have surged across Gulf infrastructure, with Saudi Arabia, like many digitally advanced economies, experiencing elevated levels of activity that underscore the importance of resilience and service continuity.
Geopolitics drives attack strategy but also intelligence needs
For many organisations, geopolitics remains an ‘external factor,’ interesting context but not operationally useful. This is a critical mistake. In a global environment where cyber threat actors may be motivated by a range of strategic, political or ideological objectives, geopolitical developments are a leading indicator of potential cyber activity, not a background narrative.
Threat intelligence teams must therefore rethink how they interpret geopolitical signals. Instead of treating shifts in regional politics as peripheral events, these developments should feed directly into cyber risk models. For example:
- Diplomatic tensions can correlate with increased hacktivism or state-linked probing.
- Periods of heightened geopolitical tension have, in various global contexts, coincided with increased cyber activity targeting infrastructure and media institutions.
- Heightened competition among major powers can broaden the digital threat environment.
A geopolitical event – whether a diplomatic spat, a security pact or a sanctions announcement – can reshape the region’s evolving strategic environment and should trigger a reassessment of threat feeds, actor motivation profiles and defensive readiness.
From intelligence to actionable outcomes
Understanding geopolitics is one thing; operationalising it is another. Organisations in the UAE and KSA must build or refine processes to ensure geopolitical insight translates into actionable cybersecurity steps:
- Dynamic threat modelling: Assess political events alongside cyber threat data to anticipate likely targets and likely tactics. For instance, state actors might pivot from espionage to disruptive wipers or hacktivists might intensify DDoS campaigns around symbolic dates or other events.
- Cross-sector collaboration: Threat intelligence is exponentially more powerful when shared. Financial institutions, telcos and national cybersecurity centres can pool signals that indicate nation-level campaign shifts, instead of siloing defensive data. Sharing intelligence, in this context, is not purely technical, it’s stabilising.
- Investment in contextualisation tools:Automated threat feeds are useful but in the GCC context, they must be supplemented with geopolitical tagging and threat actor profiling that includes geopolitical motives. GenAI and advanced analytics help fuse these signals into usable insights rapidly.
- Scenario drills and forecasting: Security exercises should simulate politically triggered cyber events, e.g., a regional border incident resulting in a coordinated information disruption campaign, to test organisational readiness.
Why this matters now
The stakes for the Middle East are high. Beyond economic damage, cyber incidents driven by geopolitical currents can undermine public trust, jeopardise national infrastructure and strain international relations. In the energy sector alone, sophisticated cyber manoeuvres have the potential not just to extract ransom but to disrupt production, compromise safety systems and trigger cascading economic effects.
In this light, cyber threat intelligence becomes more than a defensive tool: it becomes a strategic imperative for national security and economic continuity. By embracing a model where geopolitical literacy is embedded into cyber threat reasoning, organisations in the UAE and KSA can move beyond reactive defence and toward anticipatory resilience.
A call for integrated strategic intelligence
Cyber threat intelligence cannot afford to be isolated from the wider geopolitical fabric. For governments and large enterprises in the Gulf, the region’s evolving strategic environment is now a core consideration in the cyber threat landscape – it is central to the modern cyber threat landscape.
By viewing political currents as actionable inputs rather than background noise, security leaders can better prepare their organisations for what comes next. In a world where geopolitical strife increasingly plays out digitally, intelligence that incorporates both political context and cyber signals is not a luxury – it is essential.