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Cyber Incident Exercising

Test the effectiveness of your incident response plans in a safe environment and strengthen your incident management processes. We can provide cyber incident response exercises, tailored to your organisation.

NCSC CIR L2 Assured Service Provider.

What is a Cyber Incident Exercise?

A Cyber Incident Exercise (CIE) is a simulated cyber-attack that lets organisations practice their incident response and crisis management in a safe, controlled environment. These exercises help protect your business by preparing your team for real cyber incidents.

Tabletop and live-play exercises enable organisations to evaluate their response plans, identify gaps, and improve. In tabletop exercises, participants discuss their roles and decisions during a simulated scenario. Live-play exercises simulate real-time attacks, testing your team’s response under pressure.

These scenario-based exercises offer a high-impact, low-risk way to build teamwork, improve decision-making, and strengthen communication strategies before a real attack occurs.

Benefits of a Cyber Incident Exercise

  • Provides your organisation with a safe controlled environment to experience how various roles in an organisation are affected during the incident management and response process.
  • Provides the first steps you need to go back to your business and evaluate and improve your organisation’s preparedness for an incident.
  • A unique platform for learning, gaining valuable insights from our highly skilled Detection and Response team. You can ask the team the questions you need to start planning back in your business.
  • Augment existing security tooling and services to maximise return-on-investment.
  • Demonstrate known or suspected gaps to improve senior stakeholder visibility.
  • Highlight the advantages of existing tooling and services in improving incident decision-making.
  • Improve breach response times to reduce the potential impact of a compromise.

Your tailored Cyber Incident Response Exercise

Develop and Facilitate

JUMPSEC will develop and facilitate a security incident response tabletop exercise according to your objectives.

Audience

The exercise can be delivered for an executive, operational or IT audience and will be tailored to your organisation to make it realistic for attendees.

Flexible

The exercise can be stand-alone or delivered together with awareness training for participants.

Your Cyber Incident Response Exercise Structure

Expert Incident Responders

Our team of consultants brings extensive expertise in managing cyber incident response, with thousands of hours of practical experience. They excel at pinpointing potential issues and enhancing outcomes during active cyber incidents. We offer thorough training for your teams, covering critical topics such as cybersecurity threats and social engineering tactics like phishing. Our customised exercises provide hands-on, real-world guidance, and we support you at every stage to ensure you fully benefit from our services.

Resources

Latest

Crisis Management Exercise

A Crisis Management Exercise offers organisations a safe and controlled environment to rehearse their incident management and response processes

The Science Behind Cyber Security Simulations

Many organisations can underestimate the importance of simulating a cyber incident. But there are few things as important as your readiness to respond to a cyber incident.

JUMPSEC announces its Assured Service Provider status for NCSC’s Cyber Incident Exercising (CIE) Scheme

JUMPSEC today announces it has become one of only a few companies in the UK to be an Assured Service Provider in the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) Cyber Incident Exercising (CIE) scheme.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cyber Incident Response?

Cyber incident response (CIR) is a plan that organisations use to respond to, manage, and mitigate cyber security incidents. The goal of CIR is to minimise the damage and disruption of attacks, and to restore operations as quickly as possible.

CIR involves the following steps:

  • Preparation
  • Detection and analysis
  • Containment, eradication, and recovery
  • Post-incident activity

The lessons learned from CIR activities can be used to improve an organisation’s security posture by informing prevention and mitigation strategies.

When a cyber incident occurs, effective response is essential to minimise business impact and safely restore normal operations. Our skilled, experienced, and accredited incident responders can prepare your teams and proactively intercept, contain, and remediate attacks whenever and wherever they occur – before an attacker can achieve their goals. There is clear evidence that the faster a cyber breach can be identified and contained, the lower its potential cost and impact. Despite this, cyber security vendors continue to rely on reactive, ‘post-mortem’ services – deploying boots-on-the-ground to manage recovery and clean-up with the damage already done. We provide the tooling, guidance, and capabilities to facilitate proactive remote response and combat attacks of all levels of sophistication – including live, ‘hands-on-keyboard’ threats from persistent and motivated adversaries using sophisticated offensive tooling and tradecraft.

A cybersecurity incident response plan is a document that provides IT and cybersecurity professionals with instructions on how to respond to a security incident. Cyber Incident Response should include a Cyber Incident Response plan as part of a managed service.

How can Cyber Incident Response Exercises improve cyber incident plans?

Cyber incident exercising (CIE) can improve cyber incident response plans (CIRPs) in a number of ways, including:

  • Identifying weaknesses – CIE can help identify weaknesses in incident response, such as gaps, vulnerabilities, and areas for improvement.
  • Improving decision-making – CIE can help teams make better-informed decisions in high-pressure situations.
  • Enhancing collaboration – CIE can encourage collaboration and coordination between teams within an organisation, as well as with external stakeholders.
  • Establishing clear communication – CIE can help establish clear communication channels and understanding of each team’s roles.
  • Refining strategies – Post-exercise analysis can provide insights into an organisation’s strengths and areas for improvement.
  • Improving skills – CIE can improve colleagues’ internal relationships and skills, particularly their ability to deal with a cyber attack.
  • Demonstrating preparedness – CIE can enhance an organisation’s reputation by demonstrating proactive measures and preparedness in handling cyber threats.

CIE can be run in a variety of ways, from tabletop exercises to more in-depth simulations. The NCSC has produced a free resource called “Exercise in a box” that provides scenarios based on common cyber threats.

What are Incident Response Scenarios?

Cyber incident response scenarios are realistic situations that organisations use to test their incident response plans (IRPs) and educate their teams on how to respond to a cyberattack.

Here are some examples of cyber incident response scenarios:

  • Business email compromise

A CEO sends an email to the CFO with a bank account to use for a payment, but the CEO later denies the purchase

  • Ransomware

An organisation uses a DMZ, data-level backup, and renames the administrator account

  • Internet-facing vulnerabilities

An organisation uses a web application firewall (WAF), geolocalization blocking, and Conditional Access.

During a cyber incident response exercise, participants are asked questions like:

  • How would you respond?
  • What tools would you use?
  • What is your role in reporting the breach?
  • Who would you speak to in order to resolve the issue?

Incident response scenarios can help organisations identify problems and solutions to recover after a disruptive event. They can also help organisations test their resilience and educate their workforce on cyber security.

What is the difference between a table top exercise and a live play exercise?

Tabletop exercises are discussion-based sessions where representatives from relevant teams meet to discuss their roles and responsibilities, expected activities and key decision points, in accordance with an incident response plan. A discussion is facilitated by the provider and driven by a prepared cyber incident scenario.

Live play exercises team members execute their roles and responsibilities in response to controlled injects which represent a given cyber incident scenario. Different participants will typically receive different sets of injects. Activities and decisions happen in close to real-time although the incident pace and timeline is governed by an exercise controller. Live play exercises are best suited to mature organisations looking for in-depth validation of plans.

Achieve the cyber security outcomes you need.

We work to enable effective cyber security for our clients; helping them to future proof their cyber defences and realise genuine improvement over time.

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