Cyber resilience in local government is being stress-tested in real time by hostile nation-state activity, financially motivated crime groups, hacktivists, and increasingly automated attacks. Across councils, the pressure is intensified by tight budgets, legacy systems, complex supply chains, and major local government reorganisation.
NCC Group recently hosted its first Local Government Cyber Security Hub panel discussion, exploring these sector-wide challenges and threat trends, while unpicking the playbook for incident readiness, and offering practical steps for sustainable resilience. This blog will share key insights from the panel.
You can also now view the discussion on demand at -
Featuring speakers: Doncaster Council’s Andrew Hickling, Cyber Security Manager, NCC Group’s Karen Fryatt, Director of Public Sector; Tim Rawlins, Director & Senior Advisor; Ben Fountain, Principal Engagement Manager, DFIR and Andy Tang, Associate Director of Security Engineering.
The experts had a clear message: while the threat landscape evolves, the most reliable defence still starts with the fundamentals of cyber security and resilience.
As one senior incident-management advisor put it: “Attackers will go after whatever is easy.” That simplicity is what makes resilience both urgent and achievable.
Why local government has been a prominent target
Local authorities are being targeted because they are operationally important and disruption carries real-world impact. There are multiple drivers behind why councils are attractive to threat actors including:
- They have high availability expectations to deliver statutory and critical services to their residents
- They manage sensitive personal data and high-impact public records
- They often have legacy infrastructure and limited security staffing
- They are part of a complex environment of interconnected partners including national government departments, the NHS, suppliers and education bodies
Local government attacks sit within the “grey zone” where hostile state capabilities blend with criminal and covert activity. This means councils can face attacks that range from noisy denial-of-service to more harmful intrusions aimed at data access and operational disruption to erode public confidence in the state.
At the same time, the speed and scale of attacks is increasing. The panel noted that AI is compressing timelines, turning what used to be a slower, multi-stage exploitation path into faster campaigns where vulnerabilities can be identified and exploited in machine time rather than human time.
The threat actor mix: from “Keys to the Front Door” to automated speed
If there is a single pattern that kept repeating; it is that attackers prefer the path of least resistance.
Social engineering remains the front door
The panel described seeing a significant uptick in social engineering attacks where adversaries “talk” their way into systems and processes. Instead of breaking in, they aim to achieve access by convincing staff to grant permissions or credentials.
When social engineering fails, technical exploitation follows
When widely used social engineering techniques are countered by enhanced training and awareness, adversaries shift to exploiting technical vulnerabilities - often in external ecosystems like the supply chain.
In that scenario, the target is not just the council itself; it can be an organisation that supports councils and their partners. This creates secondary attack surfaces that are harder to see and patch quickly.
AI and automation raise the tempo
Our speakers highlighted that attackers are increasingly using AI assisted and agentic approaches - helping them identify weaknesses faster, craft believable lures, scale operations across multiple targets, and accelerate exploitation cycles.
The resilience checklist councils should prioritise
- Patch and reduce externally visible, internet-facing, vulnerabilities
- Harden identity controls with MFA, privileged access management, least privilege, and zero trust
- Strengthen endpoint detection and response with round the clock monitoring
- Improve backup and recovery capabilities
- Reduce successful phishing pathways with staff education and improved email security.
- Continuously test external posture to identify IT assets potentially at risk
By getting these basics right, the likely consequence is that attackers move on - toward easier targets elsewhere.
Identity, access and technical debt remain key risk areas
Misconfigured identity, weak MFA, permissive human, machine, service and AI accounts and unmanaged SaaS can create easy routes in. To tackle this, councils should start outside in: identify exposed systems, unknown subscriptions, data flows and supplier responsibilities before attackers exploit those gaps.
As a practical step, our experts recommended involving finance teams and procurement spend to identify recurring subscriptions, then confirm who owns the relationship, what data flows exist, how incident reporting works, and whether backups and security responsibilities are defined and tested in the contract.
Local government reorganisation: Creating new attack surfaces
Ongoing local government reorganisation presents opportunities for cyber teams, but it may also create exactly the conditions adversary's exploit: confusion, inconsistent policies, and new connectivity.
Reorganisation cyber risks to plan for
- New environments and configurations that create new attack surfaces.
- Identity and access gaps when merging staff, contractors, systems, and permissions.
- Legacy platforms that remain, often unaddressed with increasing vulnerabilities
- Unmapped data flows across newly connected organisations.
- Stakeholder complexity that increases incident communication challenges.
Identity was again singled out as a critical area. When councils consolidate and people move across structures, mismatched access processes can produce vulnerabilities that are hard to detect later.
Incident readiness: The first hours and days that decide outcomes
When incidents happen, speed matters - delays in declaring an incident cost time and reduce control.
Panellists cautioned against waiting for absolute clarity around a potential incident before escalation, explaining that time lost often gives attackers momentum toward encryption events and wider data impact.
What good incident readiness looks like
- Declare an incident early with clear criteria, trained staff and delegated authority to respond
- Activate out-of-hours support do not delay for daytime availability
- Use playbooks for containment e.g., isolate systems/users based on tiers.
- Communicate with controlled messaging relying on an initial “IT issue” framing until containment rather than internally or externally calling a “cyber incident”
- Plan for longer recovery before systems are available so business continuity is measured in days/weeks/months, not hours
Sustainable resilience in councils
Given councils’ finite budgets, typically small teams, and competing priorities, your resilience strategy should not be to “do everything” – but reduce the highest risk issues first and do them continuously.
Active Directory and identity hardening, exercising at all levels, backups and recovery testing, endpoint controls and known vulnerability reduction, external attack surface checks, and lightweight remediation tracking, are all good starting points when resources are tight.
The panel also highlighted a uniquely practical advantage for the public sector: the ability to share threat intelligence more openly than in many commercial settings relying on the “defend as one” concepts.
Takeaways you can use immediately
For councils, cyber resilience is how services stay running, how residents receive communications, how legal and data responsibilities are handled in an incident and how organisational change is managed.
If councils act now - rehearse incident readiness, strengthen identity and external posture, and build resilience - the odds shift. And when attackers search for the easiest path, councils that have “nailed the basics” become harder to compromise, slower to exploit, and quicker to recover.
If you are unsure where to focus your efforts next, here are five solid starting points:
- AI increases attacker speed - so tighten your vulnerability remediation and exposure reduction
- Social engineering remains a top entry method - train staff and harden email pathways
- Identity is the foundation – examine your Active Directory and enforce MFA/privileged access discipline
- Reorganisation creates attack surfaces - plan identity, data flows, and stakeholder mapping early
- Incident readiness is process, not hope - declare quickly, use playbooks, communicate carefully, and expect long recovery