Cyber Security Tabletop Exercises services
Prepare your team to handle cyber incidents, focusing on decision-making and collaboration to strengthen incident response capabilities.
CyberCX tabletop exercises are discussion-based simulations that allow your organisation’s key personnel, executives, boards, and operational teams to practise responding to a cyber incident in a safe, controlled environment. These exercises are designed with rich, realistic storylines informed by insights from the CyberCX Intelligence Team (CI) and real-world experience from our Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) experts.
Each exercise is tailored to your organisation’s unique operating environment and creates a realistic experience. By simulating incidents, we test your incident response plans and communication strategies while presenting real-time impacts of decisions made during the exercise.
Benefits of Tabletop Exercises
Improving decision-making during a cyber crisis
Our tailored tabletops, designed by experts with first-hand experience and intelligence backgrounds, help your stakeholders at all levels navigate critical decisions during a cyber incident. The exercise highlights the impacts of these decisions, enabling better judgement and faster responses in real scenarios.
Testing incident response plans
Tabletop exercises offer an interactive approach to evaluate your incident response plans in a safe, controlled environment. By revealing gaps and weaknesses, they help enhance readiness and ensure your organisation is equipped to handle actual cyber threats.
Building organisation-wide cyber resilience
These exercises can target specific teams or span multiple layers of your organisation, ensuring alignment across roles and responsibilities. This creates a cohesive and coordinated response, strengthening your organisation’s overall resilience against cyber incidents.
Who needs a Tabletop Exercise?
Organisations aiming to enhance or measure their incident response effectiveness and cross-team coordination. It aligns decision-making across boards, operational teams, HR, legal, and other groups for a unified response.
Why conduct a Tabletop Exercise?
Simulated incidents help teams test their readiness, identify gaps, and improve coordination in a controlled setting. Without testing, organisations risk confusion, delays, or inadequate responses during a real cyber crisis. Regular testing, such as annually, ensures readiness and clarity for all involved.
How does a Tabletop Exercise work?
CyberCX facilitates tailored exercises based on real-world scenarios, intelligence, and best practices. The process includes reviewing plans, designing realistic simulations, and guiding teams through decision-making to highlight areas for improvement.
Our Tabletop Exercise approach
We design bespoke cyber incident tabletop exercises tailored to your organisation’s operating model, incorporating your Cyber Security Incident Response Plan, incident response playbooks and key cyber security concerns. Drawing on intelligence from our Cyber Intelligence, Security Testing and Assurance, and Digital Forensic and Incident Response teams, we create realistic, sector-relevant scenarios based on real-world threats to safely test and strengthen your response capabilities.
We conduct exercises in a variety of formats that are adapted to suit your organisation, including in-person, virtual and hybrid delivery methods. Discover how CyberCX can design bespoke incident scenarios built on real incidents and CyberCX’s industry recognised Incident Responders guidance.
Why partner with CyberCX for Tabletop Exercises?
What makes CyberCX different is our tailored simulations, created by professionals with intelligence backgrounds and real-world experience.
Real-world experience
Our experts have diverse backgrounds in managing large-scale incidents, including work in intelligence, defence, banking, and security-cleared environments.
Customised scenarios
We tailor each exercise to fit your organisation’s unique structure and risks, using insights from our experienced technical specialists across various fields.
Threat intelligence
Our exercises incorporate real-world data and the latest threats from the CyberCX Intelligence Team to ensure the scenarios are relevant and help you stay prepared.
Proven expertise
As the leading cyber security provider in Australia and New Zealand, we bring unmatched experience, having handled over 250 cyber breaches annually. We design each exercise to give your team the skills, confidence, and coordination they need to handle cyber incidents effectively.
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Find out how CyberCX can help your organisation manage risk, respond to incidents and build cyber resilience.
Tabletop Exercises FAQs
Have a question about Tabletop Exercises not covered here?
Contact our team and we’ll be happy to help.
Usually, between 3-4 hours depending on the teams involved and the complexity of the scenario. Board exercises take1-2hr.
Participants in a tabletop depend on the type of scenario and the decisions that would need to be made during a real incident. We design tabletops for different organisational levels, including:
- Board or executive leadership, focussing on strategic decision making, organisational risk, and oversight during a major incident.
- Crisis Management exercises, testing coordination, communication, and leadership during a significant disruption, as well as when to appropriately activate Crisis Management.
- Operational and technical teams, focusing on incident response activities, such as investigation, containment, and recovery.
We can also run exercises across multiple organisational levels and involve a mix of the above participants. Other organisational members such as HR and Legal can also participate through our exercises.
No, but having a documented plan makes the exercise more useful as participants should be following any response plan you have and the procedures within it.
Tabletop exercises are discussion based. They focus on decision making, communication, and coordination, rather than a hands-on technical response.
Yes. Scenarios are tailored to your environment, critical systems, industry, and threat landscape.
Tabletop exercises can be delivered online via Microsoft Teams, or in-person. In person exercises are generally recommended for more interactive discussion, though both delivery methods provide the same scenario and outcome.
We recommended tabletop exercises are conducted at least annually, to ensure teams are fit to respond to an incident or crisis management event. As response team members leave an organisation and new members start, it is important that the response team is trained on a coordinated response. More frequent exercises can ensure teams stay familiar with their roles and responsibilities during incidents and improve on recommendations raised following past exercises.