For Australian local councils, cybersecurity has become an increasingly important operational risk.
Ransomware, phishing, compromised identities and other cyber threats can create consequences that extend well beyond the IT environment. As councils become more reliant on digital services, even a relatively contained cyber incident can affect operations, information and community trust.
Many councils have invested considerable effort into strengthening their cybersecurity posture through initiatives such as the Australian Cyber Security Centre's (ACSC) Essential Eight.
These preventative measures are critical. But they only tell part of the story. Even organisations with mature cybersecurity controls cannot eliminate cyber risk entirely.
That's why the real measure of cyber resilience isn't simply whether an organisation can prevent an attack. It's also how effectively it can detect, respond to and recover from an incident when one occurs.
So, if your council experienced a cyber incident tomorrow morning, would your team know exactly what to do?
For many IT teams, cybersecurity efforts naturally focus on reducing risk through controls such as multi-factor authentication, patch management, application control and user awareness training.
These measures are essential. However, even organisations with mature security controls can experience cyber incidents through compromised suppliers, human error, social engineering, previously unknown vulnerabilities or other attack methods.
That's why cyber resilience extends well beyond prevention. It includes your council's ability to:
Ultimately, preparedness is about ensuring your organisation can continue delivering important services when the unexpected happens.
Most councils have some form of incident response documentation. The more important question is whether people would know how to use it during a real incident.
A practical Incident Response Plan should clearly outline:
Just as importantly, the plan should be reviewed regularly and updated whenever key staff, technology platforms or service providers change. An Incident Response Plan shouldn't simply be a document that exists for compliance purposes.
It should provide practical guidance that people can follow when decisions need to be made quickly and the organisation is operating under pressure.
Backups can play a critical role in recovering from ransomware and other disruptive incidents. Unfortunately, organisations can discover too late that backups are incomplete, corrupted or unable to restore critical systems within acceptable timeframes.
Ask yourself:
There's an important distinction between having a backup and knowing you can recover. For councils increasingly dependent on technology to deliver services, that distinction matters.
Cyber incidents rarely remain an IT issue for long. Depending on the situation, a serious incident may involve:
When roles haven't been clearly defined beforehand, confusion can quickly become a risk of its own. Every council should understand:
These aren't questions you want people trying to answer for the first time in the middle of an incident. Technical response is important, but so are leadership, communication and decision-making.
The earlier suspicious activity is detected, the greater the opportunity to investigate and potentially contain an incident before the impact becomes more significant. Consider whether your council can confidently answer these questions:
Smaller councils may not have dedicated Security Operations Centres, and building that capability internally may not be realistic. Managed detection services and automated monitoring can provide additional visibility without necessarily requiring councils to build an equivalent capability from scratch.
The objective is straightforward: identify potential problems as early as possible, so the council has more time to respond.
A cyber incident response plan that has never been tested still contains a lot of assumptions. Tabletop exercises allow councils to walk through realistic cyber scenarios without disrupting day-to-day operations. These sessions can reveal issues such as:
More importantly, they help build confidence across both technical and executive teams. Like fire drills, the objective isn't perfection. It's preparation.
If your council hasn't conducted a cyber incident exercise before, you don't necessarily need to start from scratch. The Australian Cyber Security Centre provides a free resource called Exercise in a Box — a collection of ready-to-use exercises designed to help Australian organisations practise responding to cyber incidents.
These guided scenarios can help participants work through areas such as:
For councils with limited resources, this can provide a practical starting point for testing assumptions and identifying gaps in existing incident response arrangements.
You can access Exercise in a Box through the ACSC website and use the exercises to begin testing your council's response. The best time to discover a gap in your incident response plan is during an exercise — not during a real cyber incident.
How many of these statements can your council confidently answer "Yes" to?
If several answers are "No" or "Not Sure", it's worth treating those areas as opportunities for improvement rather than waiting until they're exposed during a real incident.
Cyber readiness isn't about being able to guarantee that an incident will never happen. It's about increasing the likelihood that, if something does go wrong, your council can respond decisively, recover effectively and continue supporting the services its community relies on.
Cyber incident preparedness is just one part of the broader technology resilience picture. Cybersecurity, legacy systems, AI governance, workforce capability, digital services and budget pressures are increasingly interconnected — and each can influence a council's ability to operate and serve its community.
If you'd like to explore those broader challenges, you may also like: The Top 7 IT Challenges Facing Australian Local Councils →
It explores some of the major technology challenges facing local government and practical considerations for building a more resilient technology environment.