The UK is now among the most targeted countries in the world for cyberattacks. Last year, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) handled a record 204 ‘nationally significant’ cyber attacks, a steep 130% increase on the previous 12 months.
Public sector organizations are increasingly in the firing line when it comes to cybersecurity incidents. In December 2025, Kensington and Chelsea Council was hit by a cyberattack that compromised the personal information of hundreds of thousands of residents.
This included sensitive data that could increase residents’ exposure to fraud and social engineering.
Senior Director of Solutions Engineering at HackerOne.
These incidents are not one-offs either. As geopolitical tensions rise, state-backed cyber campaigns are becoming more prevalent alongside financially motivated criminal groups. Many of these operations target identity systems and cloud collaboration tools, which are critical entry points to government networks and sensitive data.
This growing threat is being compounded by structural challenges within the public sector itself. Public sector organizations often face challenges upgrading and keeping pace with ever-changing technology, with many still reliant on legacy systems. Limited budgets for modern defenses, employee training and security staff further increase exposure.
Pronounced challenges at the local level
These challenges are particularly pronounced at the local authority level. Many UK councils share technology stacks, suppliers and IT infrastructure, meaning a successful attack can be replicated or even pivot across multiple organizations operating in similar environments.
Recognizing the scale of the challenge, the UK government is on a mission to improve national cyber resilience. Through the NCSC, it is working across both the public and private sector to improve defensive posture – collaborating with local authorities, businesses and operators of critical national infrastructure.
The government has also announced a £210 million investment aimed at bolstering public sector cyber defense – a clear sign that protecting digital services is no longer optional.
The stakes are high and traditional internet security approaches are struggling to keep pace with an expanding threat landscape.
A new model for modern cyber defense
There are various solutions to help organizations strengthen their defenses, and many public sector organizations are adopting continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) approaches. It’s focused on continuously identifying, validating and reducing real-world risk across their attack surface.
This shift reflects a move away from point-in-time testing toward continuous, evidence-based security validation. By combining AI-driven automation with expert-led validation, organizations can continuously assess complex environments with greater depth and accuracy than traditional approaches alone. This includes specialists with experience in emerging areas such as AI model security and data privacy.
Rather than relying purely on automated scanning tools or periodic assessments, modern approaches introduce adversarial validation, which tests systems in ways that reflect how real attackers behave. This helps uncover complex vulnerabilities and attack paths that traditional methods may overlook.
This continuous validation reduces the window of exposure by identifying and confirming exploitable vulnerabilities faster, enabling organizations to respond before they can be exploited. Organizations can scale these capabilities as needed, whether assessing new applications or maintaining continuous visibility across critical systems.
Crucially, this approach provides measurable insight into security effectiveness. By focusing on validated vulnerabilities and real-world exploitability, security leaders can prioritize remediation efforts and demonstrate meaningful risk reduction to executives and boards. Frameworks such as Return on Mitigation (RoM) offer a structured way to quantify the tangible impact of these programs.
Strengthening security at scale
These approaches are becoming increasingly relevant as cybercrime continues to grow in scale and sophistication. Many organizations now find themselves under sustained pressure from well-organized threat actors, particularly where ageing infrastructure, limited security resources, and constrained budgets create exploitable gaps. For public sector institutions responsible for safeguarding large volumes of sensitive data, these pressures can be especially acute.
Operationalizing CTEM requires a structured, platform-driven approach. Security leaders must first define scope. Identifying critical systems, assets, and services, and aligning efforts to measurable risk-reduction outcomes. From there, organizations can integrate continuous discovery and validation into a unified workflow that combines automated testing with expert-led assessment.
As validated findings are surfaced, teams can prioritize remediation based on exploitability and business impact, ensuring resources are focused on exposures that matter most. Over time, this creates a continuous feedback loop that strengthens overall security posture.
In environments such as local government, where councils often rely on shared suppliers and similar technology stacks, this model also enables more coordinated approaches. This includes cross-authority threat intelligence, joint exercises, and shared testing methodologies that reduce duplication while raising resilience across the board.
For CTEM to succeed in government environments, strong operational guardrails are essential. This includes clear authorization, well-defined scope, prioritization frameworks, and remediation processes that can scale without overwhelming already stretched teams. Without these foundations, increased visibility can risk adding to existing backlogs rather than reducing them.
As public services become increasingly digital, the priority for governments lies in quickly expanding their security capabilities. Moving to continuous, validated exposure management enables governments not only to find vulnerabilities, but to prove what is exploitable, prioritize effectively, and reduce risk at scale. All while keeping pace with a threat landscape that is evolving faster than traditional models can manage.
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