Types of Tabletop Exercise
Phishing Attack
Build awareness and sharpen detection skills by simulating a realistic phishing attempt to test response protocols and user vigilance.
Ransomware Response
Stress‑test your organisation’s ability to contain, recover, and communicate during a ransomware outbreak without disrupting live systems.
Insider Threat
Evaluate how well your team identifies and mitigates risks posed by trusted insiders, ensuring robust controls and escalation paths.
Bespoke Scenarios
Tailor the exercise to your unique threat landscape and business priorities for maximum relevance and actionable insights.
Tabletop Exercises: Process & Outcomes
A focused, collaborative session designed to align the workshop with your organisation’s business objectives, risk profile, and operational realities.
Key activities:
- Clarify strategic and operational goals for the exercise.
- Select sector-specific scenarios that reflect your threat landscape.
- Identify and confirm participation from key stakeholders, including:
- Board members and senior leadership
- IT and cybersecurity teams
- Legal and compliance
- HR and operations
- Communications and PR
This step ensures the exercise is relevant, realistic, and aligned with your priorities.
A CyberLab security consultant will benchmark your current cyber posture against either:
NIST Cybersecurity Framework, or NCSC guidelines (UK-specific best practice).
Purpose:
- Identify strengths and vulnerabilities in your current approach.
- Ensure the workshop is tailored to your environment, sector, and regulatory obligations.
- Provide a baseline for measuring improvement post-exercise.
A dynamic, high-energy role-play session where your team navigates a realistic cyber incident scenario – without impacting live systems.
What to expect:
- Scenario preparation: Built using insights from the scoping call and posture assessment.
- Live Hack demonstration: Delivered by CREST- and CHECK-certified testers to illustrate real-world attack techniques.
- Guided discussion: Structured around the NIST incident response phases.
- Role clarity: Each participant understands their responsibilities across critical functions.
- No-fault environment: Focused on learning and improvement, not blame.
This immersive experience helps teams stress-test processes, communication flows, and decision-making under pressure.
Following the workshop, CyberLab consultants will:
- Present a comprehensive report detailing findings, observations, and recommendations.
- Highlight strengths, gaps, and priority actions for remediation.
- Facilitate an executive-level debrief to ensure alignment and momentum for ongoing improvement.
This final step transforms insights into actionable next steps, supporting continuous enhancement of your cyber resilience.
Why Boards Choose CyberLab Tabletop Exercises
Framework-Based
Exercises are built on incident response best practices, ensuring your board’s decisions are benchmarked against recognised standards.
Fact-Based Scenarios
Every scenario is grounded in your actual risk profile, posture assessment, and sector-specific threats, ensuring the exercise is relevant and actionable.
Expert-Led
Sessions are facilitated by seasoned security consultants with deep industry experience and CREST/CHECK accreditations, providing credible insight and guidance throughout.
Actionable Outcomes
Boards receive a clear, prioritised roadmap for strengthening resilience, including an executive-ready report, SWOT analysis, and recommendations aligned to NIST phases.
Realistic, High-Impact Exercises
We create immersive, data-driven sessions that reveal real gaps in processes and decision-making.
Trusted Security Partner
With over 30 years of experience and a reputation for protecting organisations nationwide, CyberLab offers credibility in every engagement.
“Working with CyberLab has greatly enhanced our cyber security posture. Their proactive approach and tailored solutions have strengthened our defences, ensuring our customer data and operations remain secure. The practical, hands‑on training and expert guidance from their team have been invaluable, empowering our staff to respond confidently to potential threats while allowing us to focus on serving our customers with peace of mind.”
– Tim Thompson, Operations Director
Sealey Group
One of our CREST, CHECK, and Cyber Scheme certified consultants will work with you to define the scope of the engagement and ensure that our tests will fulfil your requirements.
Your assigned consultant will gather information on your organisation, including:
- IP addresses of websites and MX records
- Details of e-mail addresses
- Social networks
- People search
- Job search websites
This information will assist in identifying and exploiting any vulnerabilities or weaknesses.
Collaboratively administrate empowered markets via plug-and-play networks. Dynamically procrastinate B2C users after installed base benefits. Spectacular visualize customer directed convergence without revolutionary ROI.
Efficiently unleash cross-media information without cross-media value. Quickly maximize timely deliverables for real-time schemas. Spectacular maintain clicks-and-mortar solutions without functional solutions.
Tabletop Exercise FAQs:
A discussion-based, role‑play workshop where your team walks through a realistic cyber‑incident scenario (e.g., phishing‑led account takeover, ransomware, insider threat) to pressure‑test plans, roles, and decision‑making without touching live systems. Sessions are guided by CyberLab consultants and can incorporate a Live Hack Demo to illustrate the risks you face.
We recommend cross‑functional participation spanning executive leadership and the operational owners of response: board/senior leadership, IT/cyber, legal/compliance, HR, operations, and communications/PR.
Including every role that influences detection, response, and stakeholder management ensures decisions and handoffs are tested end‑to‑end.
- The initial call to define the scope of the exercise should take less than an hour.
- It takes around a day to benchmark your current cyber posture against the NIST Cybersecurity Framework or NCSC guidelines.
- It can take up to a week to prepare the Tabletop Exercise. We ask you to provide a user lists or to whitelist email domains and IP addresses at this stage.
- Most Tabletop Exercise workshops run for a couple of hours on a single business day. We find we get a better outcome when we run these exercises on-site.
- After the exercise, we deliver a comprehensive report within two business days and hosts an executive presentation (30–60 minutes) to align on next steps.
We will produce an executive‑ready Report & Action Plan including:
- Executive summary
- Posture assessment
- HackRisk.AI findings
- SWOT analysis of the workshop,
- Prioritised recommendations aligned to the NIST phases
- An interactive executive presentation with Q&A.
Where appropriate, we will deliver a demo illustrating real‑world adversary tactics relevant to your scenario (e.g., phishing via a reverse proxy kit to hijack sessions), helping stakeholders see the threat mechanics first‑hand.
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