ThreatDefence at the NSW Local Government Summit

Join us at the Local Government IT Summit today and see how we help NSW councils to implement their cyber security programs.

Supporting NSW Councils

NSW councils run a wide range of services on shared technology, from customer portals and libraries to planning, waste and water systems. Many do this with small IT teams that also carry responsibility for cyber security.

What a Council Cyber Security Program Covers

A council program generally rests on the same foundations as any other organization’s:

• Know what matters: Identify the systems and data that services depend on, including personal information held about residents.
• Apply baseline controls: The ASD Essential Eight sets out mitigation strategies such as multi-factor authentication, patching and restricting administrative privileges.
• Monitor for threats: Collect security events from identity, endpoint, network and cloud sources, and review them around the clock.
• Prepare to respond: Agree who is called, which actions can be taken and how incidents are reported.

Monitoring is often the hardest part for a small team, because alerts arrive at night and on weekends as well as during business hours.

Reporting is the other half of the work. Councils are accountable to their communities and auditors, so evidence of which controls are in place, and how incidents were handled, needs to be easy to produce.

How ThreatDefence Helps

ThreatDefence provides councils with 24x7 security monitoring and Essential Eight reporting. The SIEM and SOC services for Australian local government page explains the approach. The Campbelltown City Council and Ballina Shire case studies show how it works in practice, and Essential Eight reporting covers the evidence councils can produce.