June 3, 2025
Fire drills aren’t just for school kids. Cyber incidents aren't something you want to figure out in the moment.
A cybersecurity tabletop exercise is a structured, discussion-based simulation that walks your team through a real-world cyberattack scenario without the actual consequences. These exercises are one of the most overlooked, yet powerful ways to test your readiness, tighten your response plan, and identify critical gaps before it's too late.
At Cyber Solutions, we lead tabletop exercises for businesses that want to move from theory to action in their security planning.
A tabletop exercise is a guided session involving IT, leadership, and key stakeholders where your organization roleplays a simulated security event. Think of it as a test run of your incident response plan, but without impacting any live systems.
Unlike penetration testing, this is not a technical attack. It’s a strategic discussion that reveals how your team would respond to:
Whether you’re managing healthcare records, legal data, manufacturing systems, or financial assets, tabletop exercises help you do three things:
Many organizations have policies written down, but few have practiced them. Tabletop exercises help translate plans into action.
Step 1: Define the Objective
What are you testing? A ransomware incident? Communication breakdowns? Executive involvement? We help define the goals based on your industry, compliance needs, and recent threats.
Step 2: Choose the Participants
We bring in key roles, typically IT, HR, compliance, operations, and executive leadership.
Step 3: Select a Realistic Scenario
We create a scenario tailored to your organization. For example, a staff member opens a phishing email and launches malware, or your backup system is compromised.
Step 4: Conduct the Exercise
We walk through the timeline of events. Participants explain what actions they would take at each step: detecting the threat, containing it, communicating, recovering, and notifying.
Step 5: Identify Gaps in Real-Time
Throughout the session, we highlight missing processes, unclear roles, or delayed decisions.
Step 6: Provide a Debrief and Action Plan
After the simulation, we deliver a findings report with clear recommendations. You’ll know where you stand, what to fix, and how to improve.
Step 7: Schedule Follow-Up or Retest
Once gaps are addressed, we can re-run the exercise or simulate a new threat to test progress.
If you're in a regulated or high-risk industry, tabletop exercises can support compliance requirements such as NIST CSF, HIPAA, CMMC, and FTC Safeguards.
You wouldn’t run a fire drill during an actual fire. The same goes for a cyberattack.
Let Cyber Solutions guide your team through a hands-on cybersecurity tabletop exercise that prepares you for what really happens when things go wrong.
Schedule your tabletop session today:
https://discovercybersolutions.com/contact-us/
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