When cyberattacks against the United Arab Emirates roughly tripled during a recent stretch of regional conflict, climbing from 200,000 incidents to 600,000 according to the UAE Cyber Security Council, the pressure did not fall evenly.

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It concentrated in the unglamorous machinery that most people never think about until it fails: hospital networks, power substations, water treatment plants, the industrial control systems that keep a modern country running. That gap between how exposed these systems are and how closely they are watched is the problem a new joint initiative from Censys and Rilian is designed to close.

The two companies have launched Operation Digital Shield in the UAE, a program that pairs Censys's internet intelligence with Rilian's automated security orchestration to give operators of the country's most essential systems a faster, more coordinated way to see threats and act on them. The launch builds on a partnership the two companies first announced in December 2025, moving it from a stated intention into a working program with defined pillars, named beneficiaries and a stated path for expansion across the wider Middle East, Turkey and Africa region.

A Partnership Built for the Speed of AI

Censys has spent years building what it calls the most complete map of internet-connected infrastructure in the world, the kind of data set that lets an organization see its exposed servers, forgotten devices and misconfigured systems the way an attacker would. Rilian, a three-year-old company built by veterans of cyber and defense operations, brings the other half of the equation: an orchestration platform that takes that intelligence and turns it into automated, prioritized action, an approach the company has already applied at a national level in the UAE through a separate 2025 agreement with the UAE Cyber Security Council to help secure operational technology environments.

Putting those two capabilities together, Censys and Rilian argue, is a response to a specific shift in how attacks now unfold. Reconnaissance, exploitation and lateral movement that once took attackers days or weeks can now be compressed into hours with the help of automated tools of their own, which is why the companies have built their response around continuous, machine-speed monitoring rather than periodic audits.

“The need for proactive cyber defense measures continues to grow. The UAE Cyber Security Council recorded an increase from 200,000 to 600,000 cyberattacks during the recent geopolitical conflict, targeting the country's digital infrastructure,” said Meriam ElOuazzani, Vice President - Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META) at Censys. “Protecting critical infrastructure and sovereign data requires more than visibility alone, calling for practical defense mechanisms. Through Operation Digital Shield, Censys' unparalleled internet intelligence capabilities and Rilian's in-depth knowledge of security orchestration, automation and sovereign cyber defense, the companies remain committed to ensuring organizations stay ahead of emerging cyber threats, providing actionable insights.”

Three Pillars for Defenders Who Are Outnumbered

Operation Digital Shield is structured around three pillars: emergency response, civilian protection and team preparedness. In practice, that means real-time intelligence delivered directly to national Computer Emergency Response Teams and Cyber Commands, including national exposure assessments, alerts on critical vulnerabilities as they emerge, and oversight of industrial control systems and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition networks, the specialized systems that run power grids, water networks and manufacturing plants and that were never designed with modern cyber threats in mind.

The program also puts resources into training, an acknowledgment that automation alone cannot close a defense gap that is as much about people as it is about technology. Security teams across the region, like their counterparts elsewhere, are stretched thin and often managing dozens of disconnected tools; the education component of Operation Digital Shield is meant to help those teams detect, respond to and mitigate threats as they evolve, rather than simply hand them another dashboard to monitor.

Guarding the Civilian Backbone

What distinguishes this initiative from a typical enterprise security rollout is where its attention is pointed. The program's stated reach extends to hospitals, energy providers, utilities and other organizations that fall under the umbrella of Critical National Infrastructure, the civilian systems whose failure would be felt well beyond a single company's balance sheet. Giving those operators visibility into their exposed attack surfaces, and the ability to detect intrusions at a pace that matches automated attackers, is presented by both companies as the practical core of the effort.

“With evolving cyber threats, organizations demand precise and reliable intelligence to protect critical infrastructure,” said Ryan Elzein, Regional Director for Europe and the Middle East at Rilian. “Operation Digital Shield locates sensitive data and highlights at-risk systems within CNIs. This, in return, enables organizations to gain clarity regarding the gaps in security systems, prioritizing critical issues and strengthening overall cybersecurity. The initiative will help strengthen cyber resilience spanning key sectors, supporting the initiative's broader expansion in the META region. Together with Censys, Rilian delivers an end-to-end intelligence and automation platform that strengthens regional cyber resilience.”

A Model Built to Travel

The UAE launch is intended as a template rather than an endpoint. Censys and Rilian have described the rollout as the first stage of a broader expansion of Operation Digital Shield across the META region, with plans to partner with additional regional cybersecurity organizations to extend the same combination of exposure intelligence and automated response to government entities and essential service providers in other countries. For a region where critical infrastructure investment and geopolitical risk have both been rising at once, that scalability may prove to be the initiative's most consequential feature: a defense model built in one country that its architects intend to hand to the next.

For now, the immediate test is narrower and more concrete. It is whether a hospital administrator or a utility operator in the UAE notices a vulnerability alert before it becomes an outage, and whether the systems the public depends on without ever seeing them stay online through the next spike in attempted attacks.

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