Securing Pakistan's Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Pakistan is spending heavily on digital banking, e-health, online government services and, more and more, on artificial intelligence. The public conversation is mostly about productivity and growth, while whether our institutions can actually secure what they are building gets far less airtime, even though every promised benefit depends on it.
Artificial intelligence has changed the economics of cybersecurity for both attackers and defenders. Vulnerability research that used to take a specialist weeks can now be done in days, while code is being shipped faster than anyone can review it. AI agents are regularly plugged into email, databases, and cloud accounts, usually with more access than they actually need.
How AI is Changing the Threat Landscape
None of this arrives on a clean slate in Pakistan, as security practice in most institutions never caught up with digitisation in the first place. Many still lean on periodic audits, compliance paperwork, and the purchase of security products, which cannot stand in for continuous technical oversight and a working incident response capability.
We have already seen what happens when public systems are disrupted. In June 2026, Islamabad's Capital Development Authority reported a cyberattack on its property and water billing system, interrupting online services, though the technical cause has not been established publicly.
Global examples highlight the speed of AI-assisted discovery, such as when researchers found serious vulnerabilities in PHP, or when Anthropic and Mozilla researchers turned up 22 vulnerabilities in Firefox in two weeks. Looking has become cheap, and with AI help it makes sense to go back through mature codebases and test strange edge cases.
Vulnerabilities in Banking, Finance, and Global Incidents
Years in production prove very little about security, and audits routinely miss things. In the eMudhra certificate case, weak cryptographic keys went undetected for about 18 months through established procedures and independent audit cycles alike.
Conventional security tools catch known weaknesses, but AI agents help with the slower work of watching how systems respond and spotting odd behaviour. On 29 October 2026, Binance reported a security incident involving roughly $6.34 billion in digital assets. Attackers reached engineers through malware and social engineering, using stolen credentials and compromised internal AI tooling.
On Ethereum, those attackers used EIP-7702 authorisations to delegate control to a malicious smart contract. The cryptography was not broken, but the attackers went after the people and systems trusted to run the infrastructure, proving that strong encryption is useless if the machines approving transactions are controlled.
Software Development Speed and Third-Party Risks
Software is going live faster than ever, and a small group of youngsters can now build what once took a large team. However, writing code is getting cheaper much faster than it is being understood or governed, leading to unreliable authorisation in many AI-generated applications.
These risks cut across critical infrastructure, though sectors vary in damage and recovery. Banking and telecoms are better resourced and regulated, yet depend on third-party integrations. The recent attack on French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa resulted in around €100 million in fraudulent transfers via a service provider's platform.
Pakistan's banking sector has begun addressing resilience, with the State Bank launching its Cyber Shield strategy and 34 financial institutions taking part in an industry-wide cyber drill. Similar attention is harder to find across healthcare and government services.
Healthcare Cybersecurity and the Protection of Patient Data
Healthcare is particularly concerning because a breach hits privacy and patient care simultaneously. Hospitals hold diagnoses and entire medical histories, and a stolen medical history cannot be taken back.
Globally, the Change Healthcare attack affected information on about 192.7 million people, while the Synnovis ransomware attack in Britain disrupted pathology services. Pakistan has experienced warnings too, including the Maroof International Hospital ransomware attack in Islamabad in 2020.
The One Patient, One ID initiative aims to give authorised providers a patient history across institutions, but linking records raises the stakes. Without proper safeguards, a weakness in one integration could expose patient data held by many providers.
Data Protection Laws and the Human Factor in Security
Pakistan still has no comprehensive personal data protection law in force, leaving healthcare in need of clear cybersecurity requirements and mandatory incident reporting. National CERT has a coordinating role, but health authorities and sector regulators must carry responsibility themselves.
Energy and industry operations sit on ageing equipment that is hard to patch. Remote monitoring and AI-driven operations are pulling these environments closer to ordinary IT networks, where a breach can have physical consequences.
Across all sectors, the constraint is the human factor, as AI generates findings faster than organisations can triage them. Developing and retaining skilled exploit developers, incident responders, and malware analysts remains a major hurdle for the country.
Practical Steps for Securing Critical Infrastructure
Digitisation should proceed, but security practice must keep up through a handful of practical steps. Critical organisations need a clear inventory of systems, software dependencies, cloud services, and suppliers holding privileged access.
Testing must be tied to change so that major updates and new third-party integrations get checked as they happen. AI agents handling sensitive data need tight permissions, proper monitoring, and separate approval for anything high-risk.
Healthcare needs a data protection law and clear sector-level responsibility, while procurement must assess suppliers before contracts are signed. Investing in experienced specialists and bringing them into decisions on architecture and security will ensure Pakistan's institutions can respond in time.
