Anatomy of an Effective Tabletop Exercise>
Information Week – Carrie Pallardy
The article discusses the importance of tabletop exercises in boosting an organization’s cyber resilience and provides insights on how to execute effective exercises
Key points include:
1) Tabletop exercises allow enterprises to walk through a breach scenario and stress test their incident response plan.
2) Mature organizations tailor their exercises to their specific business context, risks, and attack surface.
3) The frequency of tabletop exercises varies, but they should be conducted regularly and can be segmented to focus on different teams and scenarios throughout the year.
4) Effective tabletop exercises involve multiple stakeholders, such as security, IT, legal, communications, compliance, and executive teams.
5) The cost and planning time for tabletop exercises depend on the scope and complexity of the scenario.
6) Tabletops help identify gaps in incident response plans, but organizations must follow up on fixing these gaps and validating the fixes.
7) Beyond finding weaknesses, tabletops can also uncover new ways of working together and improving processes.
8) Tabletop exercises are just one component of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that prioritizes enterprise resilience
The article also provides a real-world example of a tabletop exercise involving a pharmaceutical company’s C-suite dealing with a malicious insider taking over an executive’s social media account
The exercise emphasized the importance of immersing participants in the scenario to evoke genuine emotions and responses.
Link: https://www.informationweek.com/cyber-resilience/anatomy-of-an-effective-tabletop-exercise