Building a Stronger Federal Cyber Posture Through Collective Defense

Over the past few years, policy and operational frameworks have dramatically reshaped federal cyber priorities. The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, OMB’s Zero Trust guidance, CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) model, and the National Cybersecurity Strategy have collectively accelerated a shift from check-the-box compliance toward active, threat-informed defense.

Yet, notable recent incidents, such as the (1) Congressional Budget Office (CBO) breach in November 2025, the (2) telecom backbone provider intrusion in September 2025, the (3) F5 source code access in October 2025, the (4) Iranian-backed malicious activity in November 2025, and the (5) Rhysida ransomware in December 2024, reveal something deeper: even when individual agencies are strong, the system as a whole remains vulnerable if intelligence and visibility are not shared. 

Today’s threat actors don’t operate in silos. They collaborate via dark web forums, share tools, infrastructure, and intelligence. They move quickly from one target to another, exploiting gaps between federal agencies, critical infrastructure partners, and SLTT organizations.

To keep pace, the federal government must adopt collective defense, which is a unified, intelligence-driven, collaborative approach that strengthens national resilience.

What Collective Defense Means and the Challenges Federal Leaders Must Overcome

Most federal agencies respond to incidents differently, creating openings for adversaries. Collective defense closes that gap between agencies through shared playbooks for multi-agency threat scenarios, federated orchestration that unifies actions across disparate tools, and joint response practices that mirror collaborative incident models. Collective defense goes far beyond traditional information sharing. In the federal context, it means a fully integrated approach to visibility, analysis, response, and governance. 

Despite growing momentum, federal collective defense is constrained by:

• Interoperability issues across legacy tools and custom government-developed software

• Variability in cyber maturity across agencies

• Cultural hesitancy to share mission-critical data

• Procurement limitations

• Workforce skill gaps

Agencies must also navigate inconsistent data standards, overlapping authorities, and mission silos that make it difficult to establish unified workflows. Concerns around attribution, risk ownership, and accountability can further discourage the type of transparency needed for real-time, collective action.

Government agencies must look forward to transforming strategic intent into repeatable, automated, and mission-aligned practices that enable agencies to collaborate at machine speed. This is where the operationalization of collective defense becomes essential.

The Core Pillars of Operationalizing Collective Defense

Transitioning from theoretical cooperation to practical collective defense requires building robust capabilities around three operational pillars:

Real-Time, Bi-Directional Threat Intelligence Sharing

The foundation of collective defense is actionable intelligence that is shared at machine speed. This means moving beyond static vulnerability reports to exchanging Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) and granular behavioral analytics in near real-time.

To achieve this, the government sector must commit to:

• Standardization: Utilizing structured formats like STIX (Structured Threat Information eXpression) and TAXII (Trusted Automated eXchange of Intelligence Information) to ensure that data can be automatically ingested and acted upon by diverse security tools across different agencies.

• Platforms: Actively leveraging modern threat intelligence platforms for government agencies and encouraging participation in sector-specific ISACs/ISAOs to create formal, secure channels for rapid data exchange.

Integrated Situational Awareness

This pillar involves fusing intelligence from diverse sources to create a "common operating picture" across the collective. When one agency detects a reconnaissance attempt, this data, when correlated with similar low-level anomalies reported by other agencies, can instantly reveal a sophisticated, multi-stage attack targeting the whole sector. Integrated platforms use shared behavioral analytics to make these correlations, providing early warning signals that no single security team would detect alone.

Coordinated Incident Response

Effective collaboration demands pre-planning. A successful collective response requires moving away from ad-hoc, reactive measures to pre-negotiated, cross-jurisdictional playbooks. These playbooks must clearly define roles, responsibilities, and data-sharing protocols before an incident occurs. Crucially, this must be validated through continuous, joint simulation exercises, sometimes referred to as live-fire ranges. These simulations involve federal, state, and local entities to test the communication pathways and decision architectures under realistic pressure, and ensure seamless, synchronized action when a real crisis strikes.

A Roadmap for Government Leaders

Collective defense must be intelligence-led, federated, automated, and built on trusted collaboration across agencies and partners. Federal leaders have a unique opportunity to drive this transformation now, shaping a future where national resilience is strengthened not by individual agency defenses, but by the power of the collective.

To make collective defense a reality, government leaders must:

1. Consolidate and centralize threat intelligence flows across agencies.

2. Invest in AI-powered orchestration to unify detection and response workflows.

3. Establish cross-agency collaboration frameworks, including secure communication channels and shared operational cells.

4. Develop joint playbooks for high-impact threats across sectors.

5. Implement federated trust models that enable sharing without compromising sovereignty.

6. Measure collective success through ecosystem-level KPIs.

These steps can help create the culture and the infrastructure needed for sustainable collaboration.

Watch this video to learn about what collective defense means for the U.S. federal government.

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