Every missile and drone strike that hit the United Arab Emirates during the recent conflict with Iran was accompanied by a cyberattack aimed at the same target, according to the head of the UAE's Cybersecurity Council. Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti made the remarks in an interview with Euronews on the sidelines of the Arab Media Summit in Dubai.
Al Kuwaiti described a coordinated campaign in which kinetic and digital attacks were launched in tandem. "Whenever we see a kinetic attack on any of the ports or on any refineries or the airport, there is always a cyberattack towards many of those entities," he said. He added that the combination of methods used against the UAE was, to his knowledge, unprecedented.
"Cyber-crimes, cyber terrorism, cyber warfare, all of it came together during this crisis," he said. Al Kuwaiti did not attribute the cyber operations to any specific state, but the context of the Iran war was clear.
A new kind of battlefield
The UAE's critical infrastructure—electricity, water, and aviation—was targeted both from the air and through networks. Much of that infrastructure is privately owned, and Al Kuwaiti stressed that both Emirati and international operators worked alongside the state to defend it. "Local private sectors or international private sectors, they all came together into this solidarity," he said. "We are one of the global leaders in cyber defence."
Beyond the direct attacks, Al Kuwaiti noted a second front: a disinformation campaign that spread false material faster than verified reporting. "We saw during the crisis how many rumours came out here and there," he said. "Now it's no longer seeing is believing."
The UAE's experience echoes concerns raised across Europe, where hybrid threats—combining military, cyber, and information operations—have become a central security challenge. The European Union has been working on its own cyber defence policy, and recent incidents have highlighted the vulnerability of critical infrastructure. As EU defence officials have warned, states must be prepared to respond to attacks that do not fit traditional definitions of warfare.
Legal vacuum
Al Kuwaiti argued that international law has not kept pace with the reality of cyber warfare. There is no equivalent of the Geneva Conventions for digital attacks, he said, leaving states in a legal grey area. "A nation that gets attacked by cyber, does it actually have the right to attack back? Those laws are blurred," he said.
He called for security to be built into systems from the start, including artificial intelligence agents and large language models. He also urged governments, companies, universities, and civil society to share information more openly. "Countries might really spend so much in doing their digital transformations, but yet with a simple attack all of this could go down," he warned.
The UAE's experience is a stark reminder that modern conflicts are increasingly fought on multiple fronts simultaneously. As drone strikes and cyberattacks become more common in Europe's neighbourhood, the need for a clear international framework has never been more urgent.
