An incident response tabletop exercise is an important step to validate your incident response plans. It allows your team to practice responding to security incidents in a controlled environment or hypothetical way, helping to identify gaps in your response plan and improve your overall readiness. This guide will focus on the practical elements of preparing for and conducting a successful tabletop exercise, ensuring your team is well-prepared to handle real incidents if they occur. These help your organization to:
- Test the incident response plan: validate the effectiveness of your existing incident response plan and raise awareness amongst key stakeholders.
- Identify gaps: discover any weaknesses or areas for improvement in your procedures.
Improve communication: enhance coordination and communication among team members and stakeholders. - Build confidence: boost the confidence of your team by familiarising them with their roles and responsibilities in an incident.
Preparation: setting the stage for success
- Define objectives:
- Clear goals: start by setting clear objectives for the exercise. Objectives might include testing specific elements of the response plan, improving communication channels or evaluating decision-making processes under pressure.
- Scope of the exercise: determine the scope of the exercise. Will it involve the entire organization, or just specific teams like IT, security or management? The scope should align with the objectives and ensure the exercise is practical and manageable.
- Choose a realistic scenario:
- Relevant threats: select a scenario that is realistic and relevant to your organization’s specific risks. For example, a data breach involving customer information, a ransomware attack or an insider threat.
- Scenario complexity: tailor the complexity of the scenario to the experience level of your team. For organizations new to tabletop exercises, start with a straightforward incident and increase complexity as the team becomes more comfortable with the process.
- Develop the exercise materials:
- Incident timeline: create a timeline of the incident, detailing how it will unfold during the exercise. Include key events that will trigger specific responses from the team.
- Supporting documents: prepare any supporting materials that participants will need, such as incident reports, logs or emails that simulate communication during the incident.
- Participant roles: assign roles to participants, including the incident commander, technical responders, communication leads and other relevant roles. Ensure everyone understands their responsibilities.
- Logistics and tools:
- Venue and tools: decide where and how the exercise will take place. It can be conducted in a conference room, virtually via video conferencing tools or a combination of both. Ensure all necessary tools and resources, such as whiteboards, computers and incident response documentation are available.
- Schedule: set a date and time for the exercise, ensuring key participants are available. The exercise should be long enough to cover all critical aspects of the incident, typically lasting a few hours.
Execution: conducting the exercise
- Introduction and briefing:
- Context setting: begin the exercise by briefing the participants on the scenario and objectives. Provide them with any background information they need to understand the context of the incident.
- Rules of engagement: explain the rules of the exercise, including how participants should interact, the use of any tools or systems, and the timeline for the exercise.
- Incident simulation:
- Scenario unfolding: start the scenario by introducing the first incident event. Allow the team to respond as they would in a real situation, making decisions, communicating with each other and taking action according to their roles.
- Injects and updates: throughout the exercise, introduce new developments or complications (known as "injects") that challenge the team and require them to adapt their response. This could include discovering new information about the attack, dealing with media inquiries or managing internal communications.
- Facilitation and observation:
- Facilitator role: the facilitator’s job is to guide the exercise, keeping it on track and ensuring participants remain engaged. They should also provide feedback or additional context as needed to keep the scenario moving forward.
- Observers: if possible, have observers who can take notes on the team’s performance. Observers should focus on communication, decision-making and adherence to the incident response plan.
Debriefing: learning from the exercise
- Post-exercise review:
- Hot wash: immediately after the exercise, conduct a “hot wash” where participants can share their initial thoughts and reactions. This is a brief, informal discussion that captures immediate feedback while the experience is fresh.
- Detailed debrief: schedule a more detailed debriefing session where the team can review what happened during the exercise. Discuss what went well, what didn’t and any surprises that arose.
- Root cause analysis:
- Identify gaps: use root cause analysis to identify any gaps or weaknesses that were uncovered during the exercise. Were there any delays in decision-making? Were communication channels effective? Was the incident response plan followed correctly?
- Lessons learned: document the lessons learned from the exercise. This should include specific actions that need to be taken to improve the incident response process, such as updating procedures, providing additional training or enhancing communication tools.
- Action plan:
- Implementation: develop an action plan to address the findings from the debrief and root cause analysis. Assign responsibilities for implementing changes and set timelines for completion.
- Continuous improvement: plan for regular follow-up exercises to continue improving your incident response capabilities. Each exercise should build on the lessons learned from previous ones, gradually increasing in complexity as the team becomes more proficient.
Implementing ‘just enough’
Your first tabletop exercise may be as simple as sitting down with the Incident Response Plans, and hypothetically discussing how one incident scenario may play out live if it were to occur. This can identify practical readiness and alignment of the plans, and raise stakeholder awareness. From a compliance standpoint, this should have high-level documentation around when the exercise was conducted, who was involved, what scenario was explored, and any lessons learned and next steps resulting from the exercise.
Better practices
The better practices to consider as you scale the testing of incident response capability can include:
- Testing the specific components of the response. This may be a database recovery, a test notification to impacted customers, or mobilizing your emergency response team unexpectedly to see how quickly and effectively these response activities are enacted.
- Explore broader scenarios to see how versatile the response plans are. Incident response plans by nature are intended to manage unexpected events, so the versatility of these plans is important. Devise broad and unexpected scenarios to challenge how the response plans would deal with those in a live event.
- Simulations and testing with the broader organization help raise awareness, expand the response capabilities, and improve readiness for disaster events that may occur. Although this may seem like overkill; we’ve all seen major unexpected events play out on a global stage before.
- Regularly review the incident logs and gain insights to consider in the incident response plans and testing of those plans. Near-miss events and themes within the incident logging can give insights into what the incident response plans and testing approach should consider.
- Scale your incident response plans and testing approach in line with the risk profile of your company. As you grow larger, enterprise commitments increase, reputational risk increases, and the scale of systems and data increases, the need for more robust incident response increases with that.
An Incident Response Tabletop Exercise is a powerful tool for preparing your team to handle security incidents effectively. By focusing on practical preparation, realistic scenarios and thorough debriefing, you can significantly enhance your organization’s incident response capabilities. The ‘just enough’ approach ensures the exercise is manageable and focused on your organization’s most relevant risks, while also providing a foundation for continuous improvement. Regularly conducting these exercises will help build your team’s confidence, improve their response skills and ultimately strengthen your organization’s resilience against cyber threats.