Empowered together: Sector wide incident response in critical infrastructure — building collective resilience from incident response to crisis management

Cyber security is no longer an organisational problem to solve in isolation, our operational outcomes for Australia depend on an interconnected ecosystem of air navigation services, airports, airlines, government partners, and a complex supply chain. A major cyber incident affecting one part of the ecosystem can quickly cascade into disruption, safety impacts, and loss of trust across the sector. 

This session shares how the Australian Aviation Cyber Community, has strengthened the sector’s ability to respond together, not just "defend alone", by building trusted relationships, improving mechanisms to share threat/risk/incident information, and developing and testing an incident management plan with clear accountabilities and joint exercises. 

We’ll draw on practical lessons from sector crisis activities, including the scenario in which a sophisticated cyber threat actor leverages capabilities to target multiple member organisations, providing essential navigational data to Australia’s aviation sector. The emphasis is on shared responsibility: coordinated situation reporting and communications, sector level direction and guidance, clarifying roles and ways of working across parties, and identifying capability gaps before a real crisis forces decisions under pressure.