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As the UAE’s economy accelerates its shift to digital services, cybersecurity risks are no longer confined to corporate IT departments. Instead, they are increasingly spilling into the daily lives of consumers, blurring the line between enterprise security failures and personal data exposure.

According to Hyther Nizam, CEO of Zoho for the Middle East and Africa, cyber risk today “is not a boardroom problem” but one rooted in how organisations manage digital identities across increasingly complex systems. Everyday activities such as booking medical appointments, paying utility bills, shopping online or using digital wallets now rely on organisations safeguarding not only their infrastructure, but the credentials of every employee with access to that data.

“That trust is increasingly difficult to honour,” Nizam says, warning that many organisations lack full visibility into who holds access to sensitive data. Orphaned accounts belonging to former employees, lingering third‑party access and unchecked role changes remain common vulnerabilities. “The consumer never sees any of this. But when it goes wrong, it is their bank details, their medical records, their identity documents that are exposed.”

The most common cyberattacks — phishing, weak or reused passwords, and credential stuffing — exploit human behaviour rather than technical gaps, Nizam notes. “The threat vector is human behaviour, and human behaviour is the same whether someone is sitting at a corporate desk or shopping from their phone.” A compromised employee account, he adds, can quickly become an access point to thousands of customer records.

This risk is heightened in the UAE by the speed of digital adoption across government services, healthcare, finance and retail. Consumers have become “silent second victims” in breaches that originate within enterprise systems, Nizam says, because workforce identity failures rarely stay behind corporate firewalls.

From left: Hyther Nizam, Pramod Kadavil and Aboo Bakker Moidutty

Hybrid work and cloud adoption have further expanded the attack surface. While many UAE‑based organisations are better prepared to respond after an incident, gaps persist in closing entry points before attacks happen. “It’s not a lack of investment,” Nizam explains. “Organisations are spending on security tools and AI‑powered apps, but they still struggle with strong guardrails across all access points.”

To address this, Nizam argues for an identity‑first, privacy‑by‑design approach, supported by Zero Trust frameworks and tighter system integration. He stresses that cybersecurity failures today are “most often integration failures”, where HR systems, identity providers and access controls fail to communicate in real time.

That view is echoed by Pramod Kadavil, CEO of TECHBEE, who says cybersecurity has become central to customer trust in the UAE’s digital economy. “Companies need to treat security as a core part of their workplace, not an afterthought,” he says, pointing to rising risks from AI tools and growing interest in on‑premise AI deployments to limit data exposure.

Meanwhile, Aboo Bakker Moidutty, Founder and CEO of iTag Technologies, notes that scams, payment fraud and account theft now target individuals as much as businesses. “The risk is spread across more places now — home networks, cloud platforms, email, employee logins and customer‑facing apps,” he says, adding that the most effective organisations are those embedding security into system design from day one rather than bolting it on later.