The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will conduct special Class 12 examinations for students in seven West Asian countries whose exams in certain subjects were cancelled earlier in 2026.

The decision covers students in the UAE, Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Examinations will be offered in 40 subjects, comprising 20 academic and 20 skill-based subjects.

Forms open from September 22

According to a CBSE notification dated September 15, students eligible for the special examinations must submit their forms between September 22 and September 26, 2026. The board said there will be no examination fee for the process.

The examination date and detailed date sheet will be announced after the required List of Candidates (LOC) and examination forms have been submitted. CBSE said the submission link will be made available through its official website.

Read more: CBSE cancels Class 12 board exams across Middle East

The examinations will be held only in the seven affected West Asian countries. Existing examination centres will remain unchanged, local media reports conveyed.

Assessment scheme followed earlier

CBSE had cancelled examinations in the affected countries amid the prevailing situation in the region and introduced a special assessment scheme on March 27 to prepare results for students whose examinations could not be conducted.

Results for regular Class 12 candidates from the affected countries were announced on May 13, alongside the results for candidates in India and other overseas locations. Results for private candidates were later declared under the same assessment framework.

The latest examination decision follows a ruling by the Supreme Court of India.

Strict eligibility conditions

The new examinations will not be open to every Class 12 student. CBSE has specified that students who were absent from the 2026 Main Examinations for any reason will not be eligible to appear.

Similarly, candidates who did not participate in the 2026 Main Examinations cannot newly register as regular or private candidates for the special examinations.

Students also cannot change their subjects. CBSE said examinations will not be conducted in subjects in which the board had already held the examination.

The board has further stated that facilities for post-result declarations will not be available for these examinations.

Schools asked to inform students

CBSE has instructed schools in the seven affected countries to circulate the notification among all concerned Class 12 students and assist them with the submission process.

The board has also made clear that the September 22-26 deadline will be strictly enforced, with no extension to the application window.

The September examinations are intended specifically for students affected by the earlier cancellation of examinations in the 40 designated subjects. They will not be conducted in any other country.

Dubai’s Global Village has unveiled its VIP Packs for Season 31, introducing a refreshed collection of premium visitor benefits and a Dhs31,000 cash surprise for one lucky buyer as the destination prepares to open its gates for the new season on October 14.

Pre-orders for the limited-edition VIP Packs will run from September 21 to 25, with public sales beginning on September 26 through the Coca-Cola Arena website. This season’s packs feature a collectible Global Village Story Book design inspired by Dubai’s journey and the destination’s evolution into one of the region’s largest family entertainment and retail attractions.

The operator has retained four core VIP tiers while introducing updated pricing. The Diamond VIP Pack is priced at Dhs7,900 with a Dhs1,000 priority booking fee, followed by the Platinum pack at Dhs3,490, Gold at Dhs2,490, and Silver at Dhs1,890, each carrying separate pre-order booking fees. Buyers must be at least 18 years old and hold a valid Emirates ID, with purchases limited to one VIP Pack per person.

Each pack includes a range of premium benefits such as VIP parking privileges, parking cards, entry tickets, Wonder Pass cards and additional benefits across Dubai Holding Entertainment assets. Global Village is also bringing back its Mega Gold and Mega Silver VIP Packs, which bundle Global Village privileges with seasonal passes or park tickets for Dubai Parks and Resorts, targeting families and frequent visitors.

To drive early demand, Global Village said one Season 31 VIP Pack will contain a Dhs31,000 cheque, continuing its annual tradition of rewarding an early purchaser with a cash prize linked to the season number.

When the Middle East and Africa’s cybersecurity community gathers at the Dubai Exhibition Centre in Expo City from September 16 to 18, it does so at a crucial moment. GISEC Global 2026, the 15th edition of what organisers call the world’s third-largest cybersecurity event, expanded 20 per cent year-on-year, will draw more than 25,000 professionals and 750-plus brands from over 180 countries, under a theme that captures the mood: Cyber First: The New Digital Order.

In its launch announcement, the head of the UAE Cyber Security Council, Dr Mohamed Al Kuwaiti, framed the stakes plainly, describing AI, geopolitical instability and the rapid evolution of digital technology as forces “fundamentally reshaping the cybersecurity landscape.”

The organisers set the tone with a statistic drawn from the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026: 94 per cent of organisations expect AI to be the biggest driver of cybersecurity change over the coming year, and 87 per cent already identify AI-related vulnerabilities as their fastest-growing risk.

Ask the companies converging on Dubai what that reshaping looks like in practice, and a striking consensus emerges. “If I had to point to one thing that has reshaped the security and identity conversation across the region this year, it’s AI — and specifically, how fast it has moved from pilot projects to production,” says Dr Kamel Heus, vice-president of sales for MEA at Saviynt, who cites the same WEF figures. For him, they point in one direction: “Identity has to become the control plane for AI, not an afterthought.”

Speed and scale

The first, most obvious change is tempo. “AI is changing the tempo of exploitation more than the underlying objective,” says Meriam ElOuazzani, vice-president for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at Censys. She points to hard numbers: Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found vulnerability exploitation has become the leading initial access vector, “accounting for 31 per cent of breaches, while AI is helping compress the time between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation from months to hours.” Recorded Future, she adds, found that 68 per cent of the actively exploited vulnerabilities it tracked in the first half of 2026 “required no prior authentication”, lowering the barrier to attack still further.

For Maher Jadallah, vice-president for the Middle East and North Africa at Tenable, that speed is the defining priority. “The single biggest priority for organisations is managing the explosive speed and scale of AI-driven security threats,” he says. “Advanced AI models now allow attackers to discover and attempt to exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed. Traditional, manual 30-day patch cycles and linear ticketing processes simply cannot keep up.”

Anomali sees the same acceleration from the threat-intelligence side. “As threat actors increasingly use AI to scale and accelerate attacks, from phishing campaigns to CEO impersonation attempts, security teams are under more pressure than ever to do more with limited resources,” says Samer Jadallah, the firm’s vice-president for the Middle East and Africa, at GISEC for the first time this year.

The surface you can’t see

If attackers move faster, defenders’ problem is that they increasingly cannot see where they are exposed. “The major change I have seen isn’t the sophistication of the threat so much as the surface area organisations have to manage,” says ElOuazzani. M&A, third-party access and shadow IT, she warns, “create assets and dependencies that sit outside the inventories and processes security teams rely on” — and attackers “are working from the external view, not the asset register.”

AI itself is now a fast-growing part of that unseen estate. Censys’s 2026 State of the Internet research, she says, found exposure of AI and LLM tools “increased by more than 60 per cent in nine months, from roughly 183,000 to more than 294,000 public IPs across 43 technologies.” Ownership is murkier still: she cites model context protocol (MCP) as a cautionary example, a protocol that “does not require authentication or authorisation by default,” with Censys observing internet-accessible MCP services “advertising capabilities including database queries and command execution.”

The fix, several argue, is a shift in discipline. Tenable’s Jadallah calls it moving “from basic vulnerability discovery to exposure management”, mapping the entire digital footprint to see “which weaknesses actually lead to core business assets,” rather than “drowning in a backlog of theoretical threats.” Sujoy Banerjee, regional business director for the UAE at ManageEngine, makes visibility the foundational priority: “complete and continuously updated visibility” across “users and identities, devices, applications, networks, and infrastructure. Without this visibility, security teams may struggle to identify vulnerabilities, detect unusual activity, or determine which risks require the most immediate attention.”

Identity becomes the control plane

Nowhere is the AI surge more disruptive than in identity. “AI agents and other non-human identities are no longer a niche corner of the identity landscape; they’re becoming the majority,” says Saviynt’s Heus. “The ratio of non-human to human identities already sits at roughly 82 to 1, and it’s climbing fast… Yet around two-thirds of organisations say they lack the tools to govern their AI systems and LLMs properly. You cannot govern what you cannot see.”

Traditional identity management, built for “predictable human behaviour and largely static permissions,” breaks down when agents are “provisioned in seconds, operate continuously without direct human oversight, and call downstream applications and APIs programmatically.”

His prescription, echoed across the show floor, is to treat every agent like a privileged user: give it its own identity, a named accountable owner “from creation through retirement,” zero standing privilege, and runtime authorisation that checks “whether this specific action, by this agent, in this context, aligns with its intended purpose right now.” His headline for GISEC is blunt: identity must be treated as foundational infrastructure for AI, not an afterthought.

ManageEngine’s Banerjee agrees the perimeter has shifted: organisations must protect “not only human identities, but also privileged, machine, and application identities,” with “directory-independent visibility and control” as those identities spill beyond traditional boundaries.

The autonomous SOC and human influence

The flip side of AI-enabled attacks is AI-enabled defence, and much of GISEC 2026’s agenda – Autonomous SOC, Governed AI, Agentic AI – sits here. Anomali’s Jadallah expects “AI adoption within SOC environments to accelerate significantly,” with organisations “moving past experimentation and starting to embed AI directly into their security workflows,” alongside “growing investment in unified data strategies” to fix the fragmented visibility that hampers detection.

But the recurring caveat is governance. “Agentic AI will fundamentally change how security operations teams work,” says Harish Chib, vice-president for emerging markets, Middle East and Africa at Sophos, “bringing greater speed, scale and automation.”

His firm’s “Agentic SOC” principle draws the line clearly: “AI delivers the speed and scale, while human analysts remain responsible for the outcome… The future is not AI replacing defenders; it is AI enabling defenders to operate at machine speed with confidence and control.”

ManageEngine’s Banerjee calls the same idea “governed autonomy”, AI that augments rather than replaces judgement, with “clear thresholds for when human approval is required, particularly for actions that could have a significant operational or business impact.”

Where the digital meets the physical

For operators of critical infrastructure, the AI arms race collides with a domain that tolerates far less risk. “The biggest misconception,” says Bachir Moussa, regional vice-president for EMEA South at Nozomi Networks, “is that OT cybersecurity is simply IT security applied to a different environment. It isn’t. A breach in an operational setting doesn’t just risk data; it can disrupt production, compromise safety, halt operations, and in some cases touch national infrastructure.”

And in the Gulf, he warns, the build-out is testing the safeguards: “extraordinary investment is flowing into energy, transportation, manufacturing, smart cities, and digital infrastructure,” and the real question is “whether [security] can evolve as fast as the connectivity and automation it’s meant to protect.”

Encouragingly, he adds, most regional organisations “no longer treat security as an afterthought, but as a strategic enabler of growth.” That IT/OT convergence, notes Ned Baltagi, managing director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at SANS Institute, is one more source of “new dependencies, attack surfaces and governance requirements.”

Beyond protection: resilience, recovery and a regulatory floor

If attacks are inevitable, resilience is the new benchmark, and in the UAE it is becoming mandatory. Sophos’s Chib points to the National Cyber Security Strategy and the roll-out of NCAP, under which resilience “becomes something organisations must demonstrate: that controls exist, that they function together under pressure, and that response times hold up when it matters most.”

For Commvault, that is the whole conversation. “At GISEC Global 2026 we will be engaging with customers and partners on how organisations can move beyond cyber protection towards true cyber resilience,” says Fady Richmany, corporate vice-president and general manager for emerging markets. He expects “recovery speed, AI-driven resilience and operational readiness to become increasingly critical as organisations navigate a more complex threat landscape and prioritise business continuity,” showcasing the firm’s integrated resilience, AI capabilities and “ResOps” recovery-readiness approach.

The unifying instinct is to stop bolting security on after the fact. “Cybersecurity needs to become more proactive and continuous,” says Salah Suleiman, managing director for the South Gulf at TrendAI, showcasing the TrendAI Vision One unified platform and capabilities spanning “AI-powered cyber risk analytics and quantification, virtual patching, and AI security and digital twin technologies.” His warning captures the theme of the week: “As AI adoption accelerates, security cannot be added later. It needs to be built into how AI is designed, deployed and managed from the start.”

The longer game

Two priorities sit further out but demand action now — and GISEC has built dedicated tracks around both, including a Quantum Security Summit hosted by the UAE Cyber Security Council and the Technology Innovation Institute, and a Global Quantum Drill billed as the world’s largest quantum-readiness exercise. The first is post-quantum security.

“The threat of ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ makes post-quantum security an immediate concern rather than a distant issue,” says Tenable’s Jadallah — adversaries can “steal encrypted sensitive data today and store it until quantum capabilities mature.” The starting point, again, is visibility: “continuous asset discovery to inventory all digital assets, sensitive data stores and encryption dependencies,” then hardening access and closing the paths to high-value data.

The second is people. “The priority is ensuring that AI adoption does not outpace AI security maturity,” says SANS’s Baltagi, pointing to capability gaps “at the intersections between disciplines”, cybersecurity and AI, IT and OT, cloud and automation. His answer is a shift “from periodic training toward continuous, role-based development,” because “technology investment alone does not create resilience.”

That, in the end, is the throughline running through all 10 voices and the banner above the door in Expo City. In a “new digital order” where AI sits on both sides of the firewall, the winners will not be whoever buys the most tools, but whoever can see their whole environment, govern their AI and identities from day one, respond at machine speed, and keep a human firmly in charge of the decisions that matter.

Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from experimentation to production, raising new questions about security, governance, and control. For governments, financial institutions and other regulated sectors, the challenge is no longer where data is stored, but how AI models, compute, infrastructure and access are governed as systems become more autonomous and critical to daily operations.

Rajeev Nair, SVP for Special Projects at Core42, explains how the company sees AI infrastructure and cybersecurity converging, why agentic AI will put greater pressure on governance frameworks, and how sovereign cloud models could shape the next phase of AI deployment in the UAE and beyond.

Tell us about your participation at GISEC Global this year.

GISEC Global is one of the region’s most important cybersecurity events, and our participation this year reflects how closely cybersecurity, digitally enabled sovereignty and AI are becoming interconnected.

A key focus for Core42 will be announcing new strategic collaborations with the National Regulator, government and regulated-sector organisations that strengthen the ecosystem to support the UAE’s broader digital transformation ambitions.

Core42 is participating to demonstrate how sovereign cloud infrastructure and cyber-resilience can come together to address the requirements of highly sensitive and regulated environments.

Together with our sister company, CPX, we are bringing the digital sovereignty story to life by helping governments and enterprises retain greater control over their critical data, infrastructure and operations while continuing to access the scale and innovation they need.

Central to our presence will be Core42’s Signature Private Cloud, designed for Secret and Top Secret data, Sovereign AI orchestration and mission-critical workloads. It combines data, operational and technology-enabled sovereignty with classified-grade security, bringing together the scalability of cloud with the control and assurance required by government, critical infrastructure and regulated sectors.

GISEC also gives us an important platform to engage with customers, partners and government stakeholders on how digital sovereignty is evolving beyond compliance into an operating model for resilience, security and control.

The UAE is fast becoming a hub for developing the technologies that defend it, and at GISEC we’re excited to show how home-grown capability strengthens security across the region.

As AI moves from experimentation into production and becomes embedded in critical services, those foundations will become increasingly important to how organisations in the UAE adopt and scale Cloud and AI securely.

How do you see digital sovereignty and national cybersecurity resilience connecting?

Digital-enabled sovereignty and national cybersecurity resilience are increasingly inseparable because resilience ultimately depends on control. For governments and regulated sectors, understanding where data is stored is only one part of the equation. They also need clarity over who can access and operate the infrastructure, which jurisdiction applies, how policies are enforced, and whether services can continue securely through disruption.

This is why digital and data sovereignty have moved beyond data residency. It now encompasses control over data, operations and technology, and as AI adoption grows, that extends to models, compute and inference as well. Security must therefore be engineered into the infrastructure from the outset, with strong access controls, zero-trust architecture, continuous compliance, auditability and resilience built into the operating environment.

For national infrastructure, sovereignty enables control over the digital environment, while cybersecurity protects and reinforces that control. Together, they provide the resilience needed to operate government services, critical infrastructure and increasingly AI-driven systems securely and at scale.

What trends are you anticipating will govern AI in the next few years?

One of the biggest shifts will be from policy-based AI governance to governance and sovereignty controls built directly into AI systems and infrastructure. As AI moves into production, organisations will need controls that can be continuously enforced, monitored and audited, rather than relying on periodic compliance exercises.

Accountability will also become increasingly important as agentic AI gains greater autonomy. Governance will need to extend beyond model and data safety to address how agents behave, how decisions are traced, as well as who remains accountable for outcomes.

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40 per cent of enterprises will demote or decommission their autonomous AI agents because of governance gaps that only surface after a production incident. This reinforces the need for stronger governance if agentic AI is to move successfully from experimentation to deployment at scale. We also expect governance frameworks to align more closely with international standards, while remaining adaptable to local requirements so compliance is built in from the outset.

Resilience will be another defining priority. Once AI supports public services, financial systems and other critical operations, performance alone will not be enough. Organisations will increasingly assess AI environments on their ability to operate securely, reliably and at scale while maintaining governance and sovereignty controls.

Where do you see AI infrastructure and cybersecurity heading in the next few years?

The distinction between AI infrastructure and cybersecurity will continue to narrow as security, sovereignty and resilience become fundamental requirements of the infrastructure itself rather than separate layers added after deployment.

AI is already becoming part of critical government services and regulated industries, including financial services, where systems need to operate reliably every day and at scale. Once AI supports these environments, downtime, cyber disruption, data loss, or governance failures can have significant operational consequences. Resilience therefore becomes essential, with secure architecture, redundancy, governance and recovery capabilities designed into the environment from the outset.

In the UAE, we are already seeing this at scale through sovereign-enabled infrastructure supporting more than 11 million daily digital interactions for Abu Dhabi Government and a sovereign-enabled financial cloud for the Central Bank of the UAE.

Governance will increasingly need to operate in the same way. Rather than relying only on policies and periodic compliance checks, organisations will need greater visibility into how requirements are applied across their infrastructure. Core42’s Insight application, for example, maps regulatory requirements to technical controls, enabling customers to understand what applies to their workloads and how those controls are being implemented.

AI infrastructure itself will also become more heterogeneous. Training, fine-tuning, inference, agentic systems and real-time applications have different requirements around performance, latency, cost and energy efficiency. Organisations will increasingly want the flexibility to match workloads to the right infrastructure rather than being locked into a single architecture or technology roadmap.

What is the anticipated growth of the AI and data sovereignty industry in the next few years?

We are seeing two fast-growing markets converge — AI infrastructure and sovereign-enabled cloud. According to data from Grand View Research (GVR), the UAE’s AI ecosystem is projected to reach approximately Dhs170bn, or around $46bn, by 2030, reflecting the scale of investment in AI infrastructure, adoption and capability development.

At the same time, Gartner forecasts the global sovereign cloud IaaS market to grow at a CAGR of 36 per cent, reaching $169bn by FY2028. This reflects a broader shift as governments and regulated industries seek the benefits of AI while retaining greater control over data, workloads and infrastructure.

With AI expected to contribute around 14 per cent of the UAE’s GDP by 2030, the need for secure, resilient and sovereign infrastructure will only become more important.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in regulated industries and critical national systems, digital sovereignty will increasingly become part of the infrastructure decision itself.

Sovereign-enabled AI and sovereign-enabled cloud will therefore move further into the mainstream, with organisations looking to combine scale and innovation with security, governance, resilience and jurisdictional control.

Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC) and the UAE Ministry of Education have launched a national competition asking university students and recent graduates to develop working prototypes addressing technology challenges set by major UAE organisations.

The Advanced Technology Pioneers competition, launched under the National Science, Technology and Innovation Festival, will initially feature three challenge tracks set by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi, Emirates Nuclear Energy Company and EDGE Group.

The challenges span artificial intelligence and data science, robotics and sustainability, and communications networks.

DCT Abu Dhabi is asking participants to develop a tool that models how changes in aviation capacity could affect hotel demand in the emirate, linking flight data with visitor and accommodation trends.

ENEC’s challenge focuses on the sustainable management of seasonal jellyfish blooms near coastal infrastructure, while EDGE is seeking solutions that can maintain connectivity as users move between Wi-Fi, 5G, satellite and wired networks.

“The strength of a knowledge-based economy lies in the capabilities of its people,” ATRC DG Shahab Issa Abu Shahab said.

“By challenging emerging talent to deliver working solutions for leading national organisations, we are aiming to strengthen national capabilities, accelerate the transition from education to industry, and support in building the skilled workforce that underpins a competitive knowledge economy.”

Teams of three to four members can apply through ATRC’s ChallengeON platform, with applications closing on October 11.

Participants will receive mentorship from subject-matter experts during the programme.

Finalists are due to present their prototypes at the NSTI Festival in November, with one winning team selected in each of the three challenge tracks.

Each winning team will receive Dhs50,000, alongside additional internship, placement and industry opportunities depending on the participating organisation.

ATRC said the competition forms part of its broader efforts to develop advanced technology skills and connect students with the UAE’s research and innovation ecosystem.

The council said its talent development initiatives have engaged more than 40,000 students to date.