Why Cyber Simulation Training Should Be in Every Government's Continuity Plan
Why Cyber Simulation Training Should Be in Every Government's Continuity Plan
Real-world cyberattacks continue to target hospitals, schools, utilities, and public agencies. These attacks disrupt essential services that people rely on every day. And when they hit, there’s often no practiced response, no coordinated playbook, and no muscle memory to rely on.
While governments regularly rehearse responses to physical crises, many have never rehearsed responses to cyber incidents. In the digital era, operational continuity for governments depends just as much on cybersecurity resilience as it does on preparedness for natural disasters or public safety emergencies. Yet cyber response is still too often left untested.
This article makes the case for why cyber simulations should be a core part of government readiness.
The Real Stakes of Government Cyber Incidents
When a cyberattack hits a government agency, the damage is rarely confined to IT systems. These incidents cut straight into people’s lives by halting basic services, sowing confusion, and damaging public trust. Citizens don’t differentiate between a ransomware group and a government that failed to prevent disruption. To the public, it’s all one failure.
According to ENISA, almost 20% of cyberattacks in the EU target public administration organizations. These entities provide services like public transportation, education, and other critical functions. Of those attacks, central government systems were the most targeted, accounting for 69%.
In the US, a recent government shutdown led to an 85% increase in cyberattacks against government entities. With staff furloughed and security oversight reduced, attackers moved swiftly to exploit perceived weaknesses.
Governments aren’t facing a single type of cyber threat. They’re dealing with overlapping adversaries with very different objectives, often hitting the same environments in different ways. Understanding that mix is essential because simulations are only valuable if they reflect the threats agencies are realistically exposed to.
Opportunistic and Protest-Driven Attacks
Government portals and public-facing services are regular targets for:
DDoS campaigns
Website defacement
Credential stuffing attacks
Protest-driven disruption tied to geopolitical events
While these incidents might be short-lived, they test communication channels, public messaging, and inter-agency coordination. The actors behind them are often opportunistic, seeking attention or disruption rather than persistence.
Nation-State Persistent Access Campaigns
Nation-state actors continue to target government environments, often not for immediate disruption, but for persistent access. An October 2025 statement from the US Homeland Security Committee warned that “we must take a whole-of-society approach to countering escalating cyber threats from adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party, Iran, Russia, North Korea, and others.
A recent Microsoft report found that for nation-state actors, the government is the third most targeted sector. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), federal agencies reported 32,211 information security incidents in 2023 alone.
Such adversaries typically focus on:
Establishing long-term footholds in government networks
Credential harvesting and identity abuse
Exploiting legacy systems and hybrid environments
Pre-positioning access for future geopolitical leverage
These actors are patient. They avoid noisy malware and favor “living off the land” techniques that blend into normal operations. For governments, this means breaches may go undetected for months unless teams know what subtle signals to look for.
Ransomware and Criminal Extortion
At the same time, ransomware groups and cybercriminal gangs increasingly target municipal and regional governments because:
Budgets are constrained
Legacy systems are common
Downtime directly impacts citizens, increasing pressure to pay
Schools, hospitals, courts, and city services remain frequent targets. These actors move faster than nation-states, but the impact is often immediate and highly public.
Cybersecurity Readiness Is a Public Service Responsibility
From the average citizen’s perspective, cybersecurity is inseparable from government service delivery. Much of what makes society tick runs on digital-based platforms. That makes cybersecurity readiness a public service responsibility — not a back‑office concern.
Governments already accept this logic in other domains. Emergency managers, public health officials, and civil defense leaders treat preparedness as a shared obligation that cuts across departments. Cyber incidents should be treated the same way, because their impact is just as systemic.
Most agencies already have continuity plans, disaster recovery documentation, and response checklists. But when it comes to modern cyber threats, these plans are often incomplete, static, or untested.
Continuity planning has traditionally focused on physical or environmental crises: fires, floods, power outages, or active shooter scenarios. These events follow intuitive patterns and visible damage. Cyber incidents, by contrast, are asymmetric, fast-moving, and often invisible until it’s too late.
Governments can’t guarantee they won’t be attacked. Given the number of threat actors and incentives targeting public systems, attacks are inevitable. What governments can guarantee is that they’ve prepared seriously for when they come under cyber fire.
Running live-fire cyber simulations is the best way to honor that obligation. It signals that the government understands the stakes, accepts responsibility for digital resilience, and is willing to invest in proper preparedness.
What Governments Actually Learn From Cyber Attack Simulations
When governments run realistic cyber simulations, they learn some invaluable lessons that they couldn’t learn elsewhere.
1. Detection Gaps Across Fragmented Environments
Government environments are rarely unified. Different departments utilize different tools, logging standards, and identity systems.
Simulations routinely expose:
Alerts raised in one system but never correlated elsewhere
Indicators of compromise that are noticed but not escalated
No shared view of what “normal” looks like across agencies
Teams quickly realize that many failures stem not from a lack of tools, but from a lack of integration and practiced interpretation.
2. Slow Response to Credential and Identity-Based Attacks
Many modern attacks, especially those tied to nation-state actors, revolve around compromised credentials, abuse of privileged accounts, and identity federation/SSO misuse.
Simulations expose how long it actually takes to:
Identify which accounts are compromised
Revoke access without breaking critical services
Coordinate credential resets across agencies
What looks straightforward on paper often proves to be operationally fragile in practice.
3. Breakdown in Escalation and Authority
Governments discover that simulations often surface uncomfortable truths about decision-making, including:
No clear trigger for escalating incidents beyond IT
Uncertainty over who authorizes disruptive containment actions
Delays caused by fear of political or legal consequences
These breakdowns slow response when time matters most.
4. Gaps in Third-Party and Vendor Response
Beyond internal coordination, simulations also expose external dependencies.
When simulations involve cloud platforms, MSPs, or SaaS providers, agencies often realize:
They don’t know how quickly vendors can respond
Escalation paths or SLAs don’t hold up in a crisis
Vendor actions can conflict with agency priorities
Identifying these gaps leads to a better understanding of dependencies, improved vendor due diligence, and fewer risky third parties.
5. Communication Failures That Would Go Public
Simulations also test how prepared (or not) government agencies are to communicate service impact to the public and counter misinformation during outages. Across all of this, simulations repeatedly demonstrate the same truth:
Policies describe intent. Simulations expose reality.
They show where assumptions fail, where coordination breaks down, and where the threat landscape has outpaced existing plans.
Simulation Training Programs as a Civic Responsibility
The public expects that first responders train for mass-casualty events, that emergency alerts are tested regularly, and that disaster recovery drills are routine. Cyber response should be no different.
In fact, because cyberattacks don’t respect jurisdictional boundaries (and often strike the weakest link), simulation might be more essential in government than in any other sector.
Cloud Range is a live-fire cyber range that allows government incident response (IR) and SOC teams to train against the actual tactics being used today, including ransomware, identity abuse, supply chain compromise, and persistent access campaigns, in environments that mirror real operational complexity.
Its cyber range platform provides public sector teams with a safe environment to rehearse real-world threats through a program of live-fire simulations mapped to the latest adversary tactics and MITRE ATT&CK TTPs.
Whether you’re a state CISO preparing for ransomware threats or a municipal IT leader coordinating with emergency management, Cloud Range delivers the immersive, team-based exercises needed to close readiness gaps before they become public ones.
