Middle East Conflict Raises Cyber Risk for Businesses

If it’s not one threat, then it’s another for 21st-century cybersecurity professionals.

Just how increasingly intertwined today’s global threat landscape is becoming was underscored by a Monday (March 2) alert from the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warning businesses, particularly those “with a presence, or supply chains, in the Middle East,” that the outbreak of the conflict in Iran may see their interests targeted by cyber criminals.

“Iranian state and Iran-linked cyber actors almost certainly currently maintain at least some capability to conduct cyber activity,” the NCSC wrote.

A separate Wall Street Journal report noted that Iran’s state-backed hackers could be planning to launch “economically damaging” attacks targeting private-sector enterprises.

For Tehran, cyber operations offer a low-cost, deniable form of retaliation; they allow the projection of power without escalating to overt conventional warfare. The growing convergence between geopolitical conflict and enterprise cybersecurity is now challenging assumptions about where risk resides and what constitutes strategic defense.

See also: Supply Chain Cyberattack Puts Enterprise Trade Secrets at Risk

Geopolitics Enters the Digital Domain

Cyberattacks, which can often be conducted by non-state aligned individuals or ideologically motivated groups, are growing increasingly likely in times of heightened geopolitical confrontation.

Compounding this challenge in 2026 is the proliferation of technologies that operate outside traditional IT governance frameworks. This vulnerability layer, made up of so-called “shadow AI” and unsanctioned applications, can come into existence as organizations rapidly adopt AI-powered tools, often without formal risk controls or visibility, that can inadvertently expand their attack surface. This unmonitored layer can both introduce new vulnerabilities and obscure the tracking of risk propagation back to the enterprise.

It’s a challenging security paradox for today’s supply chain leaders. The more they embrace strategies and solutions designed to enhance the visibility and resilience of their operations, the more potential entry points there are that may need to be safeguarded from criminals.

And it’s not just the world’s biggest businesses that criminal groups are targeting. The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Vendors and Vulnerabilities: The Cyberattack Squeeze on Mid-Market Firms” found hackers are also going after middle-market firms, which increasingly depend on cloud providers, software-as-a-service platforms, managed service and logistics providers.

Read also: Third-Party Risk and AI Gave Cyberattacks the Upper Hand in 2025

What Cyber Resilience Looks Like Today

The trajectory of current events suggests a broader lesson for executives: cyber resilience is no longer a static investment in technology; it is an ongoing strategic imperative shaped by the unpredictable dynamics of a digitized operating environment whose borderless architecture hasn’t fully smoothed over real-world tensions.

According to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “AWS and Mastercard Lead Call for Urgency in Protecting the Payments Perimeter,” attack surfaces expand beyond traditional endpoints to encompass APIs, third-party integrations and multi-cloud environments.

Effective response can begin with granular situational awareness: understanding the geopolitical vectors that may motivate adversaries, mapping out the interdependencies that constitute the modern enterprise supply chain and continuously monitoring for anomalous activity that could signal campaign escalation. Real-time telemetry, threat intelligence sharing across industry and government, and adaptive defenses remain essential components of a strategic and defensive posture.

Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence report “The AI MonitorEdge Report: COOs Leverage GenAI to Reduce Data Security Losses” showed that 55% of companies are employing AI-powered cybersecurity measures.

See also: Anthropic’s Pentagon Sanctions Expose Enterprise AI’s Emerging Vendor Risks

For enterprise risk and security leaders, this represents a paradigm shift. Traditional supply chain risk management often focuses on a limited set of high-risk vendors and critical partners. But the reality is increasingly becoming one where risk propagates through far broader and less visible relationships: subsidiaries, contracted service providers, software and cloud dependencies, and even peripheral partners that have limited direct oversight from the primary organization.

In effect, breaches in this shadow layer can expose enterprises to unexpected vulnerabilities and reputational harm without the enterprise ever having had clear visibility into those entities.

“If you think about the blind spots for companies, it’s often very hard to figure out exactly their digital footprint in the modern age,” Johan Gerber, executive vice president of security solutions at Mastercard, told PYMNTS. “And if CISOs can’t see these things, they can’t protect [their organizations].”

Firms increasingly are advised to no longer rely exclusively on traditional perimeter controls in an era where attack surfaces extend through supply chains and unmanaged application layers.