Incident Response Simulation Service

About Latrobe City Council

Located in Victoria's Gippsland region, Latrobe City Council serves a diverse and growing community across several major towns, including Morwell, Traralgon, Moe, Churchill and Yallourn North. The municipality is one of eastern Victoria's key regional centres, supporting a broad range of services, infrastructure, community facilities and economic activity. Council manages more than 100 locations, including libraries, leisure centres, sporting facilities, car parks, offices, kindergartens, and maternal and child health services.

Background

The organisation employs approximately 1,000 staff and operates within a hybrid environment that combines cloud-based and on-premises technology, with staff supported by laptops and mobile devices under a flexible work-anywhere model. Despite the scale of its operations, the IT team remains relatively small, with eight staff responsible for delivering infrastructure and technology services across the organisation.

Challenges

When the Council began its cyber maturity journey, it had a number of audit and compliance action items, many relating to policies and procedures. As the organisation worked through these foundational requirements and matured its approach, the focus shifted towards strengthening business continuity, disaster recovery, and incident response preparedness.

Working with Kaon Security, Council developed incident response plans, supporting documentation, response workbooks, and a structured framework for managing cyber incidents. With these foundations in place, the organisation wanted to move beyond planning and validate that its people, processes, and decision-making structures would perform effectively during a cyber incident.

"One of our main challenges was ensuring our incident response capability was practical and effective. While we had established plans, processes and supporting documentation, we wanted confidence that they would work in practice and that executives, business leaders and technical teams understood their roles during a cyber incident," said Ace Wilhelm, Coordinator Information Technology at Latrobe City Council.

Solution

To validate its incident response capability and assess how its plans, processes, communication pathways and decision-making structures would perform during a realistic cyber incident, Latrobe City Council engaged Kaon Security to deliver its Incident Response Simulation Service.

“Having previously partnered with Kaon Security on policy development, planning initiatives, and the development of our cybersecurity framework, we had confidence in the team's approach and expertise. Kaon Security is a good fit for an organisation of our size. Their approach is practical, their services are appropriately scaled to our needs, and they understand how to work with councils like ours. The team consistently delivers solutions that fit both our operational requirements and budget,” said Ace.

The engagement included realistic simulation exercises designed to test incident response plans, communication pathways, processes, and decision-making in a controlled environment.

Benefits

Through the simulations and supporting incident response framework, Council improved cross-functional collaboration, strengthened decision-making, and increased leadership awareness of cyber risk and organisational resilience.

The exercises brought together executives, business leaders, service desk personnel, and technical teams to work through realistic cyber scenarios, testing plans, processes, and communication pathways in a safe and controlled environment.

Ace commented, “While real-world incidents rarely follow a script and people often adapt in the moment, the simulations create a safe environment to understand how events might unfold and how teams should respond. Having that prior experience is invaluable when an actual incident occurs.

The simulations are well run, realistic, and provide practical learning opportunities. Kaon Security’s Simulation Portal provided a structured way to capture outcomes, document observations, and support post-exercise reporting and follow-up actions. We gained a much clearer understanding of how we communicate within the response team, what information should be escalated, when escalation should occur, and how much information should be communicated internally at different stages of an incident.”

By involving executives and business leaders alongside technical teams, the simulations helped strengthen cross-functional relationships and improve leadership understanding of cyber risk and incident management. This increased awareness has supported further investment in security initiatives and reinforced the importance of preparedness in managing cyber and organisational risk.

Today, incident response simulations form an integral part of Latrobe City Council's broader cyber resilience program. Conducted annually, the exercises help onboard new staff, validate response processes, and drive continuous improvement across the Council's security and governance activities.

“You don't want your first experience of a cyber incident to be a real-world event. Preparation makes a significant difference, and I would recommend organisations conduct simulations regularly rather than treating them as a one-off exercise,” said Ace.