Pakistan’s ongoing digital transformation has expanded the threat landscape, with cyberattacks against banks, government websites, and critical infrastructure turning into multidimensional national security challenges. While Pakistan has started constituting specialized cyber response teams, national institutions like PKCERT, NCCIA, and NIFTAC have come into being. The institutional landscape, however, remains scattered in disparate silos without coherent legal definitions or governance and regulatory models.
The government must consider establishing a National Cyber Security Authority (NCSA) at the national level. This proposed apex regulatory body must be empowered and enabled in the country’s legal structure to provide regulatory leadership, guidance, and capacity in all cyber defense-related capabilities across sectors.
PKCERT operates as Pakistan’s national cyber incident response team, providing malware analysis, vulnerability reporting, and technical assistance across both public and private sectors. However, its authority is limited to response coordination, and it lacks the power to set and enforce national cybersecurity standards. NCCIA is a new national cybercrime investigation agency established in 2024. With clear jurisdiction and established digital forensics capabilities, NCCIA can potentially act as the national operational command for cyber defense, incident response, and national-level threat intelligence.
NIFTAC is an integrated threat management and fusion center which links over 50 federal and provincial intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism agencies across Pakistan into a centralized national intelligence database. With its six Provincial Intelligence Fusion and Threat Assessment Centres (PIFTACs) across the provinces, AJK, and Gilgit-Baltistan, NIFTAC ensures a well-coordinated intelligence sharing and response mechanism nationwide. While NIFTAC has been crucial for multi-agency counterterrorism (CT) and counter-financing of terrorism (CFT) operations, its cyberterrorism-related focus is fairly limited.
