Cyber Correlate

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Under attack?
Government & public sector

A citizen has one identity record. They cannot change it after your breach.

Digital services carry citizen data, government data and the infrastructure underneath them. An attack on any of the three costs public trust, and trust is the one asset a ministry cannot procure.

What is at stake
Citizen data and identity records
Classified and internal government data
Infrastructure behind digital services
Public trust and institutional reputation
Continuity of services citizens depend on

Attacks on government bodies across MENA, Latin America and South East Asia over the last three years have followed the same pattern: ransomware paired with data theft, extortion against the disclosure rather than the encryption, and disruption timed for maximum political cost.

The threat reality

Where attackers actually get in

Research across successful attacks on the government sector shows the entry points are not exotic. They are the three surfaces every agency already knows about.

75%
Network and endpoints

The majority of successful attacks reached their objective through network and endpoint weaknesses.

52%
Employees

Social engineering against staff remains the single most reliable route through a perimeter.

30%
Applications

Public-facing services and portals, where a single vulnerability is reachable by anyone with a browser.

Source: Cyberthreats in the public sector, Positive Technologies, 2024. Percentages exceed 100 because most attacks combine surfaces.

Method

And how they do it once they are in

The techniques are consistent enough to plan against. Malware and social engineering open the door, unpatched vulnerabilities and stolen credentials do the rest.

62%
Malware

Deployed after initial access to establish persistence and stage the extortion.

52%
Social engineering

Phishing and pretexting used to breach the perimeter without touching a firewall rule.

28%
Vulnerabilities

Known, published, and still unpatched on assets nobody owned.

20%
Stolen credentials

Legitimate access, which is why detection has to look at behaviour rather than authentication alone.

Source: Cyberthreats in the public sector, Positive Technologies, 2024.

Target state

What good looks like for a public body

Sound leadership

Confidence across stakeholders

Public, political and regulatory audiences all able to see that the position is under control.

Proactive security

Ahead of the attacker rather than reacting after disclosure, which is where reputational damage compounds.

Demonstrated digital trust

Leadership in digital trust is a stated national objective, not a technical footnote.

Alignment with national regulation

Compliance with national cyber regulation evidenced continuously rather than assembled before an inspection.

Robust technology

Secure applications

Public-facing services that do not leak data or fall over under a scripted attack.

Resilient services

Continuity of the services citizens actually depend on, including during an active incident.

Network visibility

Transparency across the network, because nothing else on this list is verifiable without it.

Managed vulnerabilities

Exposure found, owned and closed on a cycle, rather than discovered by somebody else.

How to stop them

Three surfaces, three programmes of work

Each entry point has a control set that closes it. The order below is the order we recommend for an agency starting from a standing position.

Employees

Cut off the easiest route

Continuous awareness training measured per person, realistic phishing simulation, and email security that stops the lures before anyone has to make a judgement call.

Network & endpoints

See it, then contain it

Network and endpoint monitoring with retained telemetry, so lateral movement is visible and a compromised host can be isolated in minutes rather than after the weekend.

Applications

Close the public-facing gap

Vulnerability management on a running cycle, testing that proves exploitability, and runtime protection in front of the services citizens use.

Alongside this sits identity and privileged access. Twenty per cent of successful attacks used legitimate credentials, which no perimeter control addresses.
Roadmap

Three stages, in this order

Trying to run stage three before stage one is how budgets get spent on capability that nothing underneath can support.

Stage 01

Hygiene

The controls that have to exist before anything clever is worth buying. Visibility, patching, endpoint protection and segmentation.

Vulnerability managementFirewalls & NGFWEDRAsset visibility
Stage 02

Resilience

Withstanding a determined, multi-stage attack rather than a scripted one, and being able to reconstruct it afterwards.

NDRSandboxingApplication security24/7 monitoring
Stage 03

Proactive

Operating a step ahead: testing yourselves the way an adversary would, and consuming intelligence before the campaign reaches you.

Red teamingThreat intelligenceCompromise assessmentPurple team
Next steps

Three ways to start, all of them small

01

Strategy roadmap

A call to define the target state, the regulatory drivers and a sequenced plan your leadership can fund.

Book a call →

02

Security assessment

A network and application assessment that identifies the critical risks, before any procurement decision.

Request an assessment →

03

Pilot project

Run one control in your own environment, in monitor-only mode, and judge it on what it finds.

Request a pilot →

Start with what an attacker sees.

We assess your public-facing services and hand you a prioritised risk list. No procurement commitment attached to it.