Download: GovInsider's Digital Trust & Cybersecurity Champions Report 2026

By Si Ying Thian Sol Gonzalez Zenith Wong Mochamad Azhar

Now available as a downloadable e-book, GovInsider's 2nd cybersecurity champions report, rebranded to include digital trust, features the stories of 16 global public sector leaders defending critical systems and protecting data.

Now available as a downloadable e-book, GovInsider's Digital Trust & Cybersecurity Champions Report features the stories of 16 global public sector leaders defending critical systems and protecting data.

Attackers are now using AI to compress weeks of hacking into hours, while governments everywhere race to keep up.

Both attackers and public sector defenders are fighting for the same thing, which is people's trust in how their government handles their digital lives.

That is why Cybersecurity Champions, which we ran last year, has become Digital Trust & Cybersecurity Champions.

Read across the stories in this report and the line between cybersecurity and data protection fades.

A breach is a data protection failure, and a data protection law without technical capability behind it is hard to enforce.

Covering one without the other would give readers half the picture. So, the report now features regulators alongside defenders.

We also changed the format. Last year’s Q&As handed readers a transcript and left them to find the insight.

This year, each story is a feature that starts from a real problem or decision, uses the interview to explain how and why, and gives enough context for a reader in another country to see what applies to them.

We were more selective too, building each piece around a senior leader who sets direction and can speak candidly about trade-offs.

A few threads run through the stories:

AI sits on both sides of the contest. Singapore’s Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS) describes “Advanced Persistent Defence” as its answer to AI-armed attackers, while Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 shares what it learned from turning frontier AI on its own code.
Resilience does not depend on big budgets. Fiji focuses on essential services, while Ecuador’s data protection authority builds its own IT systems and tools with just 13 staff in its operational core.
The long game matters, from Indonesia’s preparations for post-quantum cryptography to Italy’s push to sustain an EU-funded programme beyond its funding.

This report was made possible with the support of Palo Alto Networks.

All stories were independently reported and written by GovInsider’s reporters.