Intro
We are happy to make public our new service. This time we will focus on prevention and training. By keeping your staff informed and well trained in incident handling you can keep most threats at bay. So, let’s talk about Tabletop Exercises and how they can help every organisation to reinforce its cybersecurity walls.
Tabletop Exercises (TTX)
In this exercise, the participants, from different departments, including the C-Levels, walk through a hypothetical scenario and discuss how they would respond to it. With the right planning, cybersecurity tabletop exercises can be an effective, engaging, and relatively low-cost way to prepare an organisation’s information assurance program for the inevitable cybersecurity incident. These kinds of hypothetical scenarios that affect the safety or the security of a group existed well before computers were invented. They are usually purely discussion-based.
Benefits for you
- Compliance
- 1. TTX is mandatory if you want your organisation to comply with the EU’s NIS 2.
- Team building
- Enhance training through practice.
- Create stronger bond to work towards a common goal.
- Enhance employee collaboration and cross-department collaboration.
- Boost employee understanding and appreciation of other departments tasks and stress, weaknesses and strengths.
- Create basis for collaboration, problem solving, and conflict resolution.
- Preparedness in case of crisis.
- Process development
- Validate/Update IR and Crisis Management plans.
- Enhance communication and reaction times.
- Validate/Update escalation/reporting procedures.
- Clarify roles and responsibilities before, during and after an incident.
- Fulfil compliance requirements and verify that all due diligence is done.
- Validate non-IR processes and plans for relevance and gaps.
- Gap analysis
- Identify potential new risks.
- Identify improvement points.
- Generate new ideas.
- Identify constraints that impede risk mitigation goals.
- Challenge status quo.
- Awareness
- Improve overall awareness.
- Create knowledge hub of info exchange.
- 3. Improve SMEs knowledge and training.
- Technology integration
- Verify compatibility of technologies.
- Verify efficiency of tools in place.
Outro
Tabletop wargames have been used by militaries around the world since the 19th century. The same logic is being applied here, by having your “officers” experience an event, even if it is in a game, it provides them the experience to respond when a similar real-life event happens.
We hope that this short article has ignited your interest for how you could introduce TTX to your organisation. If that’s the case please get in touch, our consultants will be more than happy to help you. And remember human error is the most common way to have your defences crumble, so keeping your staff well trained is an essential investment.
Until next time.