The conflict has moved through two distinct phases.
The first began in June 2025, when strikes on Iranian nuclear and military targets triggered open interstate escalation and public-sector cyber warnings. During that period, heightened vigilance was warranted, but the broad catastrophic cyber events many anticipated had not yet materialized.
The second phase began on February 28, 2026, with renewed U.S.-Israeli strikes and broader regional escalation. What's different now is that military action, maritime disruption, energy volatility, proxy activity, and cyber pressure are moving together, and that convergence changes the calculus for businesses in significant ways.
The key insight from our team: low visible cyber activity should not be mistaken for calm. It may simply mean attackers are probing, staging, or waiting for a better moment to act. Iran's cyber playbook doesn't require immediate, large-scale destructive effects to create meaningful impact.
Here's the timeline that matters for business leaders:
Our current assessment: treat this as a sustained period of elevated business and cyber risk, not a short-lived headline event.
What makes the current environment uniquely dangerous isn't any single risk in isolation. It's that three risks are now reinforcing one another simultaneously.
Military action, proxy retaliation, shipping attacks, and regional spillover create direct exposure for any organization with personnel, assets, customers, suppliers, or logistics dependencies tied to the region. Even businesses far from the battlefield feel the effects when carriers reroute, insurers reprice risk, and governments issue new advisories.
Instability tied to the Strait of Hormuz has immediate downstream consequences: fuel costs, freight delays, insurance repricing, parts availability, delivery times, and customer behavior. This matters to security because organizations under cost and continuity pressure often defer projects, extend aging infrastructure, and tolerate more operational shortcuts than they otherwise would. Economic friction translates into more exposed systems and less room for disciplined response.
Cyber operations offer Iran and aligned actors a scalable form of retaliation that can be calibrated more easily than direct military action. It supports signaling, psychological pressure, disruption, intelligence collection, and access development without requiring immediate overt attribution.
The most likely near-term pattern isn't a single catastrophic attack. It's a broadening of access operations, leak activity, DDoS, web compromise, and selective disruptive actions against reachable targets, symbolic targets, or shared-service providers.
The real issue is that each risk lowers the threshold for the others to matter. Kinetic escalation raises business stress. Economic stress weakens resilience. Cyber operations exploit exactly those conditions. The right framing for leadership isn't "war risk" or "cyber risk" in isolation. It's resilience risk under geopolitical pressure.
One of the most dangerous misconceptions in the current environment is that smaller organizations are too peripheral to matter. They're not. In many cases, they're the most available targets and the easiest route to something larger.
Iran-linked activity has long favored practical access paths: weak identity controls, exposed remote access, internet-facing appliances, and under-resourced environments. Smaller and mid-sized organizations frequently have exactly this combination. You don't need to be strategically famous to be operationally attractive.
Many mid-market firms sit inside larger organizations' delivery chains. Manufacturers support defense and industrial customers. Regional healthcare providers connect into insurers, labs, and device ecosystems. Logistics firms sit between importers, warehouses, and retailers. Attackers don't need to breach the most hardened enterprise first if a smaller partner offers trust, connectivity, or privileged access.
Modern mid-market environments are highly identity-centric. Administrators often manage email, collaboration, CRM, VPN, endpoint tooling, and cloud infrastructure through a relatively small number of privileged accounts. This makes account takeover, session theft, MFA fatigue, and help-desk manipulation especially dangerous.
The biggest exposure is often conceptual. Here are the assumptions that create the most risk right now:
The right response isn't panic. It's disciplined reduction of the attack paths most likely to matter. Our full report outlines eight priority actions for IT leaders and executives, including:
It also includes a section specifically for executives on how to frame this as an enterprise risk management issue, translate technical exposure into board-level language, and make informed decisions rather than reacting to headlines.
Our complete threat intelligence assessment, Iran Conflict: Middle East Cyber Threat Landscape & Risk Outlook, is available now.
It includes detailed documented targeting patterns, the full list of priority actions, executive guidance, and a breakdown of how Todyl's platform addresses the specific attack paths most likely to matter in this environment.
Download the Report: Iran Conflict Cyber Threat Landscape & Risk Outlook
This report reflects open-source reporting, government advisories, and Todyl threat intelligence current as of March 13, 2026. The conflict is actively evolving. Todyl will publish updates as the threat picture materially changes.
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Andrew is a seasoned Field CISO with over a decade of experience in the cybersecurity and intelligence domains. As an expert in enterprise solutions architecture and security strategy, Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP), and Security Operations Center (SOC) leadership and transformation, Andrew excels in aligning technology solutions with business objectives to enhance organizational security.
His extensive background includes pivotal roles at Leidos, CrowdStrike, and IBM, where he led the development of complex security solutions, managed and led large SOC organizations, and transformed cybersecurity and risk management programs for both Federal and Fortune 500 private sector organizations.
Andrew’s technical expertise spans threat intelligence, SOC operations, Zero Trust implementations, security architecture, and comprehensive threat detection and remediation strategy development. A recognized thought leader, he has contributed to numerous publications and spoken at industry events, sharing his deep knowledge of threat and risk management strategies. Andrew holds several certifications, including CISSP, CRISC and GSTRT certifications.
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