Councils across the UK are facing an evolving cyber threat landscape, from phishing and ransomware to denial of service attacks targeting public infrastructure. High profile breaches including Hackney Borough Council’s £12 million ransomware incident and disruptions at Tewkesbury, Salford, Trafford and others, all demonstrate the real consequences on services, costs, and reputational trust (insight.scmagazineuk.com).
But councils aren’t alone. Organisations like the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and insurers such as Ecclesiastical offer vital resources and guidance to support cyber resilience planning, response and education.
Here’s our 5-step roadmap for parish and town councils seeking to both prevent and recover from cyber incidents:
- Governance & risk assessment: Put cyber on the corporate risk register
• Embed cyber risk into your corporate risk register and business continuity planning.
• Work through the seven step approach recommended by Local Government Association & NCSC: clarify risk roles, likelihood, attacker profiles, impact, mitigation strategies and recovery plans.
• Identify all software, shadow IT, service dependencies and access points, including contractors and councillors, to prioritise your controls. - Cyber policies, awareness & training: Make every user a guardian
• Everyday staff and elected members remain the first line of defence. Just one phishing click can compromise everything.
• Develop a council specific cyber security policy that sets out device usage, email caution, password hygiene, reporting procedures and consequences for breaches.
• Use structured training, simulated phishing exercises and tabletop response drills (e.g. NCSC’s Exercise in a Box) to build both awareness and response muscle. - Technical controls: Defence in depth
• Enforce security standards like Cyber Essentials or NCSC 10 Steps to Cyber Security: firewalls, endpoint antivirus, patch management, vulnerability scanning and Web Check where appropriate.
• Sign-up for free public sector NCSC services such as Early Warning and internet scanning to flag suspicious activity and keep your systems visible and monitored. - Back ups, testing & incident response: Prepare for ‘when’, not ‘if’
• Regularly back-up data, test restoration procedures and ensure continuity plans explicitly cover cyber incidents with fallback options for essential services such as casework, finance and emergency response.
• Conduct annual or scenario based cyber drills so that staff and councillors understand how to escalate, communicate and recover should an attack occur. - Insurance: transfer risk, speed recovery
• Clear Councils’ Clear Cyber for Councils policy, underwritten by Ecclesiastical, offers tailored cover against cyber incidents, data breach liabilities and reputational harm. It includes extras like breach alert monitoring, cyber/GDPR advice and risk scoring tools.
• Ecclesiastical provides risk management support materials, scenario planning, cyber risk guidance and templates, free to insured councils.
• A robust cyber policy helps fund forensic investigations, data reinstatement, legal defence and communications support in the aftermath of an incident.
Get started today
• Get in touch for your Risk Assessment Toolkit and cyber scorecard via Clear Councils.
• Contact us for a cyber insurance quote or schedule your free GDPR advice consultation.
• Download NCSC guidance (e.g. Board Toolkit, Exercise in a Box) and involve senior leadership in training sessions.
• Set a date for your first cyber awareness drill and table top scenario.
As cyber threats continue to grow in scale and sophistication, ignorance is no longer an option and neither is complacency. Through consistent governance, education, protective technical measures, tested readiness and trusted insurance cover, parish and local councils can deliver digital services securely and serve their communities with confidence.
