The Middle East, North Africa, and Africa (Mena) region is facing a severe shortage of cybersecurity professionals, estimated to be 300,000, according to Mastercard’s Cyber Pulse Report 2026, covering threat data from March 2025 to March 2026.
The report revealed that 43 per cent of regional organisations admitted that they were operating with understaffed security teams. Africa faces an even more acute crisis, with only 20,000 certified cybersecurity professionals serving the entire continent.
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The report called on corporate leadership to treat cyber resilience as a strategic priority rather than a back-office concern. Selin Bahadirli, Executive Vice President of Services for EEMEA at Mastercard, stated in the report that the issue is “tied to business continuity, regulatory exposure, and customer trust,” and demands engagement at CEO and board level.
Using its RiskRecon platform to analyse 397 Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (EEMEA) organisations against a global benchmark of nearly 396,000, Mastercard report identified four security domains where the region consistently lags behind global peers, including software patching, web application security, web encryption and network filtering.
Mastercard urges organisations to implement real-time asset inventories, automate patch management, standardise on TLS 1.2 or above, enforce strict egress filtering, and embed security testing directly into software development pipelines.
“In a world where progress depends on trust, building collective resilience is not just a safeguard – it is a shared responsibility,” Bahadirli said.
Middle East tops cyber attack charts
The report said that the Middle East has emerged as the most attacked region within the broader Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (EEMEA) zone, absorbing nearly half of all recorded cyber incidents over the past year.
The Cyber Pulse Report 2026, which analyses 13 months of threat data between March 2025 and March 2026, paints a sobering picture of a region where digital transformation is racing ahead of security readiness – and where geopolitical tension is increasingly being fought in cyberspace.
The Middle East accounted for 49 per cent of all cyber attacks recorded across EEMEA during the period, compared to 36 per cent for Eastern Europe and just 15 per cent for Africa. The United Arab Emirates was specifically named among the top three most targeted countries in the entire region, alongside Ukraine and Pakistan.
The most alarming finding in the report relates to the direct link between geopolitical escalation and cyber threat activity. When regional tensions flared in late February 2026, cyber attacks on GCC countries surged by 198 per cent on the very first day of the conflict – a phenomenon the report describes as the “first 10 days rule,” identifying this window as the most dangerous period following any geopolitical escalation.
Two sharp spikes recorded on March 3 and March 6 pointed either to a sustained multi-day campaign or two distinct threat actor groups operating in rapid succession. Critically, attack volumes remained elevated throughout the entire month of March, a warning that the danger does not recede once initial spikes subside.
“Post-spike baselines remain two to three times elevated, meaning security teams cannot stand down after the initial wave passes,” the report cautioned.
Source: Khaleej Times