Why Asia’s Public Sector Is Rethinking Cyber Resilience

• Public sector organizations across Asia are accelerating digital transformation and expanding their reliance on cloud services, APIs, and interconnected digital infrastructure.

• This shift has dramatically increased cyber risk, with the region experiencing tens of billions of web application and API attacks, alongside trillions of Layer 7 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in recent years.

• AI-enabled attacks, software supply chain dependencies, and geopolitical cyber activity are converging to create persistent, systemic threats that traditional perimeter defenses can no longer contain.

• As a result, cybersecurity strategies are shifting away from absolute prevention toward resilience, continuity, containment, and operational stability during active attacks.

• Asia’s public sector can strengthen cyber resilience through modern architectures, collaboration, and adaptive security models.

Across Asia, public sector organizations are accelerating digital transformation to modernize citizen services, strengthen critical infrastructure, and support economic growth. Governments are digitizing everything from identity services and healthcare systems to transportation networks and financial platforms.

That shift has delivered efficiency and scale, but it has also introduced new forms of cyber risk. As systems become more interconnected, attackers are no longer limited to isolated entry points. A compromised API,  breached supplier, or successful phishing campaign can now trigger cascading disruptions across entire government ecosystems. 

At the same time, adversaries are evolving. AI-enabled attacks, large-scale DDoS activity, and supply chain compromises are becoming more frequent and more difficult to contain.

In a new white paper, Global Threats, Regional Solutions: Securing Asia’s Public Sector with Akamai, Akamai examines how these forces are reshaping cybersecurity risk across the region and why resilience, rather than prevention alone, has become the defining requirement for modern government security strategies. This blog post summarizes the key takeaways from that paper.

Public sector organizations across Asia are operating in one of the world’s most active cyberthreat environments. Akamai data highlighted in the white paper shows that the region experienced more than 80 billion web application attacks in 2024, including 11 billion attacks targeting APIs, which now underpin many government digital services.

DDoS activity presents an even starker picture. Between 2023 and 2024, the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region recorded more than 7.4 trillion Layer 7 DDoS attacks, making it the second-most targeted region globally. These attacks are increasingly used alongside other techniques to overwhelm systems, distract security teams, or extort public institutions responsible for essential services.

Several forces are compounding this risk, including:

• AI-enabled attacks that automate reconnaissance, generate convincing phishing and impersonation campaigns, and accelerate zero-day discovery

• Software supply chain dependencies that expand attack surfaces beyond traditional government boundaries

• Geopolitical cyber activity that targets government networks and critical infrastructure for disruption, espionage, and influence

As a result, cyberattacks against public sector systems are no longer rare or isolated events. They’re persistent, adaptive, and increasingly intertwined with broader economic and national security risks.

As public sector systems become more digitally interconnected, maintaining visibility into how data and traffic move across environments has become increasingly difficult. Government agencies now rely on a mix of cloud platforms, on-premises infrastructure, third-party services, and APIs to deliver essential services at scale.

This complexity creates visibility gaps. APIs exposed to partners, contractors, or citizens may be poorly inventoried or inconsistently monitored. At the same time, limited insight into east-west traffic can make it difficult to detect lateral movement once an attacker gains access. In these conditions, threats can persist undetected long enough to cause operational disruption, data exposure, or compliance failures.

The challenge is not simply the volume of attacks, but the difficulty of seeing how those attacks traverse interconnected systems. Without comprehensive visibility across applications, networks, and identities, security teams are often forced into reactive response, addressing incidents only after damage has already occurred.

Visibility gaps are often compounded by fragmented security approaches. In many public sector environments, security responsibilities are distributed across agencies, departments, and external vendors, each operating with different tools, policies, and priorities.

This fragmentation limits the effectiveness of traditional perimeter defenses and static controls. When defenses aren’t coordinated, attackers can exploit the seams between systems, moving from one environment to another with little resistance. In highly interdependent government ecosystems, even a localized breach can escalate into broader service outages or systemic risk.

As cyberthreats continue to evolve, these structural challenges make it increasingly difficult for public sector organizations to rely on prevention alone. The growing gap between attack speed and response capability is accelerating the shift toward security models that emphasize resilience, containment, and continuity.

For public sector organizations across Asia, the goal of cybersecurity is shifting. Absolute prevention is no longer realistic in an environment defined by persistent attacks, expanding interdependencies, and rapidly evolving adversary tactics. The age of perimeter-based defenses is over. Resilience must now be the baseline.

Resilience reframes the problem. Rather than assuming systems can be fully protected from compromise, a baseline of resilience prioritizes continuity when attacks occur. That includes limiting the blast radius, preventing lateral movement, and keeping essential services available even under sustained pressure.

This shift is especially critical for organizations that are responsible for citizen services, national infrastructure, and economic stability. A single outage can disrupt healthcare delivery, transportation systems, utilities, or financial operations. In these environments, downtime isn’t just an IT issue — it directly affects public trust.

Regulatory and geopolitical pressures reinforce this reality. Governments across the region are increasing expectations around data sovereignty, incident disclosure, and operational continuity. Although compliance establishes a strong baseline, it doesn’t always ensure resilience. Security strategies must move beyond checklists to incorporate adaptive defenses, continuous verification, and architectures designed to withstand failure.

Building resilience requires securing applications from code to runtime and applying consistent controls across cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. It also means designing networks to assume breach, so defenses can contain threats and preserve critical operations even when attacks succeed. Together, these principles are becoming central to how public sector organizations evaluate modern security strategies.

Around the world, governments facing sustained cyber pressure have begun to apply resilience principles in real-world conditions. Akamai’s experience in supporting public sector organizations during high-stakes incidents offers insight into what effective cyber resilience looks like when it matters most.

During Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Akamai provided cybersecurity support to help defend the Ukraine government’s websites, applications, APIs, and infrastructure against persistent cyberwarfare. Despite continuous DDoS campaigns, malicious bot activity, and application-layer attacks, essential digital services remained operational throughout prolonged periods of disruption.

In the United States, Akamai has worked closely with federal agencies and the Department of Defense to deploy Zero Trust identity, credential, and access management (ICAM) capabilities. These implementations enabled secure collaboration with contractors and partners while enforcing least-privilege access and continuous verification. Web application security, DNS protection, and microsegmentation further reduced exposure across complex hybrid environments.

Similar approaches are expanding globally. In the United Kingdom, Akamai recently collaborated with P3M Works to extend Zero Trust ICAM capabilities across government and defense supply chains. In Australia, partnerships have introduced microsegmentation to help protect critical infrastructure by isolating sensitive systems and containing potential breaches before they spread.

Across these examples, the common thread isn’t a single tool, but an architectural shift. Security strategies are designed to assume compromise, limit impact, and preserve continuity rather than rely solely on blocking attacks at the perimeter.

As Asia’s public sector continues to digitize at scale, resilience increasingly depends on coordination beyond individual agencies. Systemic cyber risk spans governments, critical industries, and private sector partners, making collaboration a practical necessity rather than a policy aspiration.

Several approaches can help strengthen resilience across the region, including:

• Information sharing and early warning through sector-based Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) and national cyber exchanges, enabling faster detection and response to emerging threats

• Broader adoption of Zero Trust principles across industries that underpin national economies, including energy, manufacturing, telecommunications, and finance

• Workforce and capability development supported by joint simulations, training initiatives, and research partnerships between public and private sectors

These efforts aren’t about replacing existing controls. These approaches strengthen the existing controls by improving visibility, reducing the blast radius, and enabling more coordinated responses in highly interconnected environments. Together, these improvements help public sector organizations respond more effectively when incidents occur and they limit the impact of attacks that can’t be fully prevented.

The pace of the cyberthreats facing Asia’s public sector isn’t slowing down. AI-enabled attacks, software supply chain vulnerabilities, geopolitical cyber activity, and financial fraud are converging in ways that challenge traditional security assumptions. In this environment, resilience is no longer optional.

The full Akamai white paper explores how Asia’s public sector organizations can adapt to this reality, drawing on real-world attack data, global government experience, and practical approaches to securing critical systems. It outlines why maintaining operational continuity, protecting public trust, and reducing systemic risk now require security strategies built for resilience from the start.