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DUBAI: Rising geopolitical tensions, artificial intelligence-driven attacks, and complex digital supply chains are reshaping the global cyber landscape, experts warned during a World Economic Forum session in Dubai on Tuesday.

The session, titled “Riding Out Cyber Storms,” was part of the Annual Meeting of the Global Future Councils and brought together Samir Saran, president of the Observer Research Foundation; Kemba Eneas Walden, president of the Paladin Global Institute; Joe Levy, CEO of Sophos; and Dario Leandro Genua, Argentina’s secretary of innovation, science and technology.

According to the Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook, 71 percent of respondents reported an increase in cyber risks linked to geopolitical friction, accelerated AI, and expanding supply chain vulnerabilities.

Speaking on the first day of the summit, Saran noted that heightened political tensions have sharply increased global demand for cyber capabilities.

“Who is your adversary and what are their capabilities?” he asked. “We believe states view cyber weapons and capabilities as legitimate means to employ.”

He said global preparedness remains uneven, with even technologically advanced countries at risk of cyberattacks.

“One part of the world is very familiar with the other while the other doesn’t, because they do not have the capabilities” he said. “For example, the US is more vulnerable than China.”

Saran added that AI has multiplied attack capabilities “multifolds” creating new challenges for governments and markets alike.

“If risk insurance markets are not able to help people defend themselves, some see cyberattacks as their form of protection,” he said. “When identities can be fake or created, organizations need to rethink safety.”

Walden said adversaries are exploiting AI faster than defenders can adapt.

“From my perspective, they are winning,” she said. “They are able to do things at speed and scale. The adversary doesn’t have to worry about the risk.”

She called for renewed urgency among defenders.

“Cyber has always been a geopolitical struggle,” she said. “Adversaries are already using the technology faster than the defenders, we have to match speed with speed.”

A recent report by SQ Magazine confirmed AI-related breaches reached 16,200 incidents up to September 2025, a 49 percent increase from the previous year.

The Middle East alone saw a 31 percent increase in AI-assisted espionage and cyberattack campaigns, particularly targeting critical oil and energy infrastructures.

Joe Levy said cybersecurity fundamentals remain the strongest defense amid shifting digital threats.

“Time matters very much here to defenders,” he said. “The first place I advise people to look is the basics. We tend to ignore them because something more exotic always gets our attention.”

Levy urged organizations to strengthen operational hygiene and practice incident response.

“You need more than cybersecurity insurance, you also need practice,” he said.

Genua stressed that cybersecurity “involves everything and everyone” and highlighted the importance of coordination across borders and industries.

“We have to know we are as strong as the weakest link in the network,” he said.

Genua said Argentina is developing joint plans of action “between sectors and between nations” and is launching a cyber arena to promote public awareness and training.

“We need to train people in both the public and private sector and give them tools to navigate their safety,” he added.

DUBAI: Former BBC journalist Mishal Husain, now editor-at-large at Bloomberg Weekend, has questioned the media’s sense of duty of care toward Shamima Begum and whether she would have been treated differently if she were not Muslim.

Speaking on Tuesday at the 2025 Romanes Lecture, a free, public annual lecture at the University of Oxford, Husain said it has been six years since the chair of the UK-based Independent Press Standards Organization said “that he thought Muslims were on occasion written about in the newspapers in ways Jews or Catholics would not be.”

In her speech titled “Empire, Identity and the Search for Reason,” she gave the example of Shamima Begum, saying it was worth asking whether she would have been perceived the same way if she had not been Muslim.

Begum, aged 15 at the time, was one of three girls who left London in 2015 to join Daesh in Syria.

Four years later, The Times tracked her down and interviewed her when she was nine months pregnant.

“The callousness of her words in that interview — including her saying she had been unmoved by the sight of a captured fighter’s severed head in a bin — prompted widespread revulsion,” Husain said.

Shortly after, there began a “scramble” to get the first TV interview, and both Sky and BBC reached out to her, she added.

Husain highlighted the media’s lack of empathy for Begum’s state. She had lost two children to illness and malnutrition, and the third was born just hours before one of her TV appearances.

She said that “one broadcaster said their correspondent had ‘tracked down the IS bride in a hospital just hours after she gave birth,’” and that the other recorded the segment when her son was just 3 days old, “the distinctive cry of a newborn audible off camera as she spoke.”

She added: “When I watched these interviews, I saw something that appeared to go entirely unnoticed in editorial decision-making — or was regarded as unimportant.

“I saw a teenage mother, only just postpartum.”

Husain recounted her own experience giving birth in the UK, where she had the help and support of family members and medical facilities. Even then, she said, she was “in no fit state to give any interview in the weeks, let alone the hours or days, after those births.

“And certainly not an interview of consequence to the rest of my life, conducted without advice, representation — or even access to information.”

Husain said she found it difficult to reconcile the media coverage with a sense of duty of care toward the interviewee, to assess “whether an interviewee is in a position to give informed consent, or in a place where they can speak freely.”

She highlighted how news organizations had failed to emphasize the ways in which Daesh targeted and enticed young girls, providing little context for how Begum became radicalized.

In late 2015, Husain was given an official briefing on the “online material used by IS to entice girls to join them,” and it was “clever and visually attractive,” including emojis, imagery and messages designed to appeal to teenage girls.

She added: “Little of this ever emerged publicly. Questions about grooming or entrapment have rarely gained currency.”

Although Husain has never met Begum, she said she often thinks of her. Even now, 10 years later, “we still don’t know how her story ends,” as “she remains in Syria, stripped of her British citizenship and with little hope of securing another passport,” Husain said.