Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) and threat detection have emerged as essential strategies for proactively identifying and mitigating cyber risks. By integrating these approaches, government entities can enhance their cybersecurity posture, improve response times, and minimise potential damage from cyber incidents.

Understanding Threat Intelligence and Threat Detection
CTI helps government entities proactively identify, assess, and mitigate cyber threats to protect critical infrastructure, sensitive data, and public services. Intelligence relating to potential cyber threats is collected from multiple security products, open-source intelligence, and private intelligence feeds, before being analysed, prioritised, and shared with security teams. This intelligence enables organisations to anticipate, prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks effectively. It includes indicators of compromise (IOCs), tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by adversaries and can be tuned to focus on threats targeting specific industries – such as government.

The Role of Threat Intelligence and Threat Hunting in Government Agencies
We rely on government agencies, servicing as a backbone of our societal infrastructure, for vital services and information. Government agencies provide critical infrastructure and are entrusted with safeguarding sensitive data and facilitating seamless operations across various sectors. However, they are prime targets for hackers, political activists, and foreign state-sponsored actors. To illustrate this, one of the most public and potentially damaging breaches on record is the foreign adversary attack against the Federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) resulting in the exfiltration of over 20 million sensitive personnel records.

However, this won’t be the last of these attacks and, according to the latest ThreatQuotient research The Evolution of Cybersecurity Automation Adoption, central government organisations in Australia see state-sponsored attacks (36%), attacks on supply chains (34%), and phishing (34%) as the three most common attack vectors.

Attacks against government agencies happen for many reasons. Breached confidential information could mean leaking personal information from public records. Using old and outdated security software could result in catastrophes for public-led services, processes, and operations.

The stakes are incredibly high as a successful attack can disrupt operations that impact lives and livelihoods, compromise sensitive personal information from public records, and erode the trust citizens place in government. The integrity of critical national infrastructure hangs in the balance, as adversaries seek to exploit vulnerabilities and undermine the foundations of societal functioning. As governments strive to uphold security and stability in the digital age, safeguarding against these multifaceted threats emerges as an urgent imperative.

How to Combat Threats
A proper cyber defense plan, including processes for sharing threat intelligence across Federal, State, and Local Government Departments and Agencies and prioritising vulnerability management of currently active exploits, is a cornerstone for building resilience. A comprehensive threat intelligence operation helps government agencies:

● Prioritise and Collaborate to Accelerate Response: Cutting through the noise to focus on what matters most to government agencies, and engaging in collaborative analysis that accelerates understanding, facilitates multi-agency interaction, and dramatically improves response.

For years, industry and government cybersecurity experts have called for the need for increased collaboration in the form of threat intelligence sharing among defenders. Our report shows that collaboration now has significant momentum, with 66% of Australian respondents in central government agencies saying they share threat intelligence directly with their partners and suppliers and over half (52%) sharing through an official threat-sharing community.

● Adopt Automation: In its infancy, cybersecurity automation was often treated as a separate initiative. However, it has evolved beyond being a standalone objective and has become embedded within broader security tools and frameworks, increasing its adoption and effectiveness. Australian respondents remain very positive, with 86% rating cybersecurity automation as important, up from 82% in 2023. The main drivers for this adoption in the Australian central government agencies are increasing efficiency (40%) and productivity (46%). They are also more likely than other sectors to leverage automation for alert triage and vulnerability management.

Respondents from Australia are also more likely to be automating incident response than other regions (40% are implementing this use case compared to a global average of 32%), in a bid to relieve pressure on stretched teams. This shift signals a movement toward the “plateau of productivity,” where organisations are no longer just experimenting with automation but actively relying on it to improve security outcomes.

Onward
Cyber threat intelligence and Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response are critical components of government cybersecurity efforts at the federal, state, and local levels. As the number and complexity of cyberattacks increase daily, it is essential to ensure that IT security is prepared to deal with the threats from the network. This applies more than ever to public authorities today, as they are usually less well-protected than companies in the business world and are increasingly the target of devastating attacks by cybercriminals.

This highlights the urgent need for cybersecurity practices to continuously evolve and innovate in response to the rapidly shifting digital landscape. Effective collaboration, automation adoption and AI utilization, and continuous threat intelligence-sharing mechanisms are essential to safeguarding public sector digital infrastructure. The goal is to strive for a fundamental transformation in how cybersecurity is perceived, practiced, and implemented, building a more resilient, adaptive, and forward-thinking cybersecurity ecosystem.