How to Run a Cyber Exercise Part 3: Types of Exercise

We are experiencing a relentless expansion of technology and the pervasive nature of corporate networks, the spectre of cyber threats looms larger than ever before. Your organisation, whether a government entity, corporation, or small business, will find itself grappling with the critical imperative of fortifying their cyber defences against increasingly sophisticated adversaries. In this high-stakes game of cat and mouse, where cybercriminals are continually evolving their tactics, the need for proactive cyber exercising has become paramount.

Cyber incident exercising has emerged as a vital tool for organisations to test and strengthen their resilience against cyber threats. By simulating real-world cyber attack scenarios, these exercises enable individuals and teams to enhance their preparedness, identify vulnerabilities, and develop effective response strategies. In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber warfare, where threats can originate from both internal and external sources, cyber incident exercising offers a powerful means to sharpen defences, foster collaboration, and ultimately minimize the potential damage caused by cyber incidents.

This article delves into the diverse world of cyber exercising, exploring its various types and highlighting the manifold benefits it could bring to your organisation. From table-top exercises that foster strategic planning to technical simulations that test network security, each type of cyber exercise serves a unique purpose in preparing your personnel and the over arching organisation for the complex challenges they may encounter.. By understanding the different forms of cyber exercising and their specific advantages, you can craft comprehensive training programs that empower your personnel and bolster your cyber resilience.

Validation Exercises:

Validation exercises can take form of table top, hybrid or even fully live, however they have a slightly different perspective, they focus on testing and validating the effectiveness of existing or in production cybersecurity policies and procedures. They involve analysing and verifying the implementation of security measures to ensure compliance with industry standards and best practices. Validation exercises are especially useful when putting a brand new policy into place. By identifying weaknesses and or gap in these policies and procedures, organisations can make informed decisions to improve them and make sure they are fit for purpose. below are a list of the benefits of running validation exercises:

1. Ensuring Quality and Consistency: Validation exercises ensure that a policy or procedure consistently produces results that meet predetermined quality standards. By validating a process, your organisation can establish confidence that the process is capable of delivering the desired outcomes consistently. This leads to improved quality control, reduced errors, and enhanced end results.
2. Risk Mitigation: A validation exercise allows your organisation to identify and mitigate risks. Through thorough testing and analysis, you can identify potential failure points, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities in the process. By addressing these risks, your organisations can minimize the likelihood of errors, failures, or negative outcomes, thereby reducing operational, legal, reputational and financial risks.
3. Continuous Improvement: Validation exercises are an opportunity for your organisation to evaluate and improve it's existing processes. By analysing and documenting the process, you can identify areas for improvement and efficiency gains.. Validating a process encourages a culture of continuous improvement, leading to optimized performance.
4. Stakeholder Confidence: A validation exercise enhances stakeholder confidence. Validating a process demonstrates that the organisation strong incident response procedures in place to ensure consistent quality of defence. This fosters trust, enhances your organisation's reputation, and improves relationships with stakeholders.

Tabletop Exercises:

Tabletop exercises are scenario-based discussions conducted in a simulated environment. They bring together key stakeholders, that can include cybersecurity professionals, IT staff, executives, and other relevant departments, to discuss and evaluate their response to a hypothetical cybersecurity incident. During these exercises, participants discuss roles, responsibilities, and incident response procedures, allowing them to identify areas of improvement and enhance coordination and communication within your organisation. Tabletop exercises are cost-effective and provide an opportunity to test response plans without the need for a full-scale, real-time simulation. Tabletop incident response exercises provide several benefits to your organisation in enhancing their incident response capabilities. Here are some key advantages:

1. Preparedness Assessment: Running a tabletop exercise allows your organisations to assess its preparedness in responding to cybersecurity incidents. By simulating realistic scenarios in a controlled environment, you can evaluate the incident response plans, procedures, and the effectiveness of your response teams. This assessment helps identify gaps, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in the incident response process.
2. Team Coordination and Communication: During a tabletop exercise, participants from different departments and roles come together to collaborate and respond to the simulated incident. These exercises foster teamwork, coordination, and communication among team members. By working through the exercise, participants can practice sharing information, making decisions, and coordinating actions, which strengthens the overall incident response capabilities of the organisation.
3. Identifying Roles and Responsibilities: Running a tabletop exercise provides an opportunity to clarify and define roles and responsibilities within the incident response team. Through the exercise, participants can understand their specific roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authority during an incident. This clarity ensures efficient and effective coordination during a real incident, minimizing confusion and delays in response efforts.
4. Testing Response Plans: A good tabletop exercises enable your organisations to test its incident response plans in a controlled environment. By walking through the response plan step-by-step, you can identify any gaps or areas where the plan may be insufficient. This testing helps refine the plan, ensuring that it is comprehensive, up-to-date, and aligns with current threats and best practices.
5. Learning from Mistakes: Tabletop exercises provide a safe environment to make mistakes and learn from them. Your participants can identify and address shortcomings in their response strategies without the real-world consequences. By discussing and analysing the exercise outcomes, You can identify areas for improvement and implement corrective actions to enhance the incident response capability.
6. Stakeholder Engagement: Tabletop exercises often involve key stakeholders, such as executive leadership, legal, PR, and IT teams. Engaging these stakeholders during the exercise fosters a shared understanding of the incident response process and facilitates their involvement in decision-making. This collaboration ensures a coordinated response across different functions and departments, leading to more effective incident management.
7. Training and Skill Development: Tabletop exercises provide valuable training opportunities for your participants. By actively engaging in the exercise, they can practice their incident response skills, familiarise themselves with relevant tools and procedures, and develop critical thinking abilities. This training enhances their readiness to handle real incidents and builds a stronger incident response team.
8. Continuous Improvement: The insights gained from tabletop exercises can be used to continuously improve the incident response process. By identifying weaknesses, gaps, and areas for improvement, Your organisation can make updates to its incident response plans, enhance their detection and response capabilities, and implement lessons learned from the exercise. This iterative approach ensures that the incident response process evolves to address emerging threats effectively.

Hybrid Exercises:

Hybrid exercises combine elements of both tabletop and fully live exercises. These exercises aim to strike a balance between the controlled environment of tabletop exercises and the realism of fully live simulations. Hybrid exercises involve running simulated attacks against a company's systems and networks while also conducting discussions and evaluations of the response. This approach allows your organisation to assess its technical capabilities, as well as their incident response plans, communication channels, and coordination across different teams. Hybrid exercises provide a comprehensive evaluation of the organisation's preparedness while minimizing the risks associated with fully live exercises. Here are some key advantages of running hybrid exercises:

1. Realistic Assessment: Hybrid exercises provide a more realistic assessment of your organisations cybersecurity capabilities compared to tabletop exercises alone. By introducing simulated attacks and technical testing alongside discussions and evaluations, you can assess both their technical defences and their incident response plans, communication channels, and coordination across different teams. This holistic assessment provides a more accurate representation of the organisation's preparedness and highlights areas for improvement.
2. Controlled Environment: While fully live exercises simulate real-world attacks, they can carry significant risks and potential disruptions to business operations. Hybrid exercises offer a more controlled environment where you can test your defences and response capabilities without the same level of risk. This controlled environment allows your organisation to evaluate their security posture while minimising the potential negative impact on operations, systems, and services.
3. Collaboration and Communication: Hybrid exercises promote collaboration and communication among participants from different departments and roles. By combining discussions and technical testing, Your participants will have the opportunity to work together, share information, and coordinate their actions. This collaboration enhances team dynamics, improves communication channels, and strengthens the overall incident response capabilities of the organisation.
4. Technical Assessment: Hybrid exercises allow your organisation to assess its technical capabilities and vulnerabilities. Simulated attacks can be conducted to test the effectiveness of cybersecurity controls, incident detection and response mechanisms, and system resilience. This technical assessment helps organisations identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their infrastructure, enabling them to take proactive measures to strengthen their defences.
5. Response Plan Evaluation: Hybrid exercises provide an opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of incident response plans in a more realistic context. By simulating real-world attacks, you can test the efficiency and effectiveness of your response plans, identify any gaps or deficiencies, and refine your incident response strategies. This evaluation helps ensure that response plans align with current threats and best practices, enabling organisations to respond swiftly and effectively to cybersecurity incidents.
6. Learning and Improvement: Hybrid exercises facilitate active learning and improvement within the organisation. Participants can learn from the exercise experience, including the technical testing, discussions, and evaluations. The exercise outcomes provide valuable insights into areas that need improvement, whether in technical defences, incident response procedures, or communication protocols. This feedback can be used to implement corrective actions, enhance processes, and continuously improve the organisation's cybersecurity posture.
7. Risk Mitigation: By conducting hybrid exercises, your organisation can proactively identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks. The technical testing component helps uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses in systems, allowing you to address them before they can be exploited by malicious actors. The exercise outcomes inform risk mitigation strategies, enabling your organisation to strengthen its defences and reduce the likelihood and impact of future cyber incidents.

Fully Live Exercises:

Fully live exercises, also known as red teaming exercises, or even failover DR tests, involve simulating real-world cyber attacks on an organisation's systems. These exercises are highly realistic and aim to test an organisation's ability to detect, respond to, and recover from a cyber incident. Fully live exercises often involve engaging external cybersecurity experts who play the role of malicious actors, attempting to breach your organisation's defences. These exercises help identify vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and potential gaps in security, enabling you to refine your incident response plans and improve your overall resilience. Here are the key advantages of running fully live exercises.

1. Real-World Simulation: This realistic simulation allows organizations to assess their actual ability to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents. By experiencing the challenges and complexities of a live attack, your organisation will gain valuable insights into their readiness and can identify areas for improvement.
2. Identifying Vulnerabilities and Weaknesses: Fully live exercises help your organisations identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in their systems and networks. External cybersecurity experts, acting as malicious actors, attempt to exploit security flaws and gain unauthorised access. By uncovering these vulnerabilities, you can take proactive measures to patch, update, or strengthen your defences, reducing the risk of successful attacks in the future.
3. Testing Incident Response Capabilities: Fully live exercises provide an opportunity to test and evaluate an your organisations incident response capabilities under realistic conditions. It allows incident response teams to practice their skills, coordination, and decision-making in a high-pressure scenario. By responding to simulated attacks, you can assess the effectiveness and efficiency of their incident response plans and personnel, identify gaps, and improve their response processes.
4. Enhancing Threat Awareness: Fully live exercises enhance threat awareness among employees and stakeholders. By witnessing the impact and consequences of a simulated attack, participants gain a deeper understanding of the potential risks and vulnerabilities faced by the organisation. This heightened awareness promotes a culture of vigilance, encourages proactive security practices, and helps employees become more attentive to potential cyber threats.
5. Validation of Security Controls: Fully live exercises validate the effectiveness of implemented security controls, policies, and procedures. By subjecting your organisation's systems to real attacks, these exercises reveal previously unseen weaknesses or gaps in security measures. This validation ensures that security controls are functioning as intended, and any deficiencies can be addressed promptly, thereby enhancing the overall security posture.
6. Testing Detection and Monitoring Systems: Fully live exercises provide an opportunity to test your organisation's detection and monitoring systems. By mimicking real attacks, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your intrusion detection systems, log analysis tools, and security monitoring capabilities. This testing helps identify any blind spots or areas where detection and monitoring can be improved, leading to enhanced threat detection and early incident response.
7. Stakeholder Confidence: Conducting fully live exercises demonstrates your commitment to cybersecurity and readiness to face real threats. Stakeholders, including customers, partners, and regulators, gain confidence in the organisation's ability to protect sensitive information and respond effectively to cyber incidents. This can lead to increased trust, improved relationships, and a competitive advantage in the market.

End to End Exercises "Blue Team to Board"

A "Blue Team to Board" exercise starts with exercising your blue team and works its way up the incident management ladder, the primary goal is to simulate and evaluate the organisation's incident response capabilities at various levels, from the technical teams to executive leadership. The exercise progresses through different levels of response, often referred to as gold, silver, and bronze. I will cover this in more detail in a later part of this exercising series.

Cybersecurity exercises play a crucial role in strengthening your organisations ability to defend against cyber threats. By conducting validation exercises, tabletop exercises, hybrid exercises, and fully live exercises, you can identify vulnerabilities, improve incident response plans, enhance coordination, and ultimately bolster your cybersecurity posture. It is essential to choose the appropriate exercise type based on the organisation's goals, resources, and level of preparedness. Regardless of the exercise type, the key is to ensure that the lessons learned are implemented, and ongoing assessments are conducted to adapt to the ever-evolving threat landscape. With robust cybersecurity exercises, your organisation can be better equipped to safeguard its assets and protect against emerging cyber threats.