100 ready-to-run cyber tabletop exercises across 15 incident domains. Search them, pick one at random, or tell us who will be in the room and we'll rank the scenarios that fit those people best. Every exercise shows who to involve, how long it runs and an outline — and the scenario prompt is free to copy and read out.
Running one for real? Pro adds the facilitator's run sheet for each exercise: a minute-by-minute timeline, timed injects, step-by-step facilitation guide and the questions to put to each person. Or build your own with the Tabletop Runbook Generator.
Who's in the room?
Pick the people you have — we'll suggest exercises that fit them.
Four days after you contained a ransomware attack and restored most systems from backup, a threat intelligence vendor emails your CISO a screenshot. Your company is listed on the group's leak site with a 72-hour countdown and a sample: forty scanned employee passports and a folder of customer contracts. The listing claims 600 GB was taken and will be published unless you pay $2.4 million. Your original investigation found no sign of data theft, and staff were told so. A trade reporter has already left a voicemail asking for comment. Do you engage, and what do you say?
It is 23:15 on the Friday before a long weekend. The only on-call engineer gets an alert for mass file renames on a file server, then twelve more servers in five minutes. The SOC is outsourced: it has opened a ticket but cannot isolate hosts without written approval. The IT manager is on a flight until 06:00, the CISO is not answering, and the incident response retainer's hotline wants a contract number nobody on shift has. The attacker is still active. Who can authorise isolation right now, and what do you pull first?
A senior account executive resigned on Friday and joins a direct competitor in two weeks. On Monday, a data loss alert shows she synced 4,000 files to a personal cloud account over the weekend, including a full CRM export, pricing models and the customer contract folder. She is on garden leave but still has a working laptop and VPN access. Her manager insists she is trustworthy and that this is 'just her portfolio'. Legal wants to act before anything reaches the competitor. What do you do, and in what order?
On payday, three employees tell HR they have not been paid. In each case the HR self-service portal shows their bank details were changed eight days ago, from a sign-in that passed MFA. One employee remembers clicking a 'benefits enrolment' link in an email. This month's payroll file has already gone to the bank. Two more employees' details changed yesterday, and next week's contractor run is being prepared now. The affected staff are upset and want to know when they will get their money. What do you do today?
It is 10:40 on a Tuesday. A secret-scanning service emails your security inbox: a long-lived access key for your production deployment account was pushed to a public code repository 47 minutes ago, from a contractor's personal fork. The key has administrator rights. Your cloud audit log shows calls made with that key in the last ten minutes from an address nobody recognises, and the release pipeline uses the same key for tonight's deploy. The contractor is not answering their phone. What do you do in the next fifteen minutes?
At 02:10 on a Sunday your on-call engineer sees the managed service provider's remote-management agent running a PowerShell script on every Windows server at once. The script disables backup agents and the EDR service. Your MSP's emergency line rings out. Their status page is fine. You have the console credentials for your own tenant but not for the MSP's master console, and their agent runs as SYSTEM on 340 servers and 1,200 laptops. Within ten minutes, file servers in two offices begin renaming files. What do you pull first?
Your new data-loss prevention pilot produces its first weekly report. In seven days, staff pasted content into a free public AI chatbot 1,840 times. The sample includes a production database connection string, a customer contract with pricing, two HR investigation notes and a spreadsheet of patient appointment details. Your acceptable-use policy says nothing about AI. The approved enterprise AI tool, bought six months ago, has 30 active users out of 1,200. A department head replies to your email: "Everyone uses it. Banning it will just push people to their phones."
Your filling-machine supplier emails every customer on a Thursday afternoon: an attacker had access to its remote-support platform for at least three weeks and 'may have used customer connections'. Your beverage plant gives this supplier always-on remote access to the line controllers so it can tune machines without a site visit. Your firewall shows sessions from the supplier's platform on four evenings when the supplier says no engineer was working. Its account manager wants the connection left open because a firmware fix is scheduled for Monday. Do you cut them off, and what do you look at first?
A colocation provider’s night technician calls your on-call engineer at 22:40. He found a man in a high-visibility vest inside your company’s locked cage, holding a laptop with a cable plugged into a top-of-rack switch. The man said he was ‘from the network team’ and left before site security arrived. The front desk logged him following one of your contractors through the entry mantrap two hours earlier. Your cage hosts the card payment platform for 2 million customers. What do you check first, and who do you call?
A severe storm has hit the region served by a 1,200-person home insurer, and claims calls are at five times normal volume. At 08:20 the cloud contact-centre platform your agents use for calls, chat and call recording goes down across the provider’s entire region. The provider’s status page says ‘investigating’ and gives no estimate. Agents can still log into the claims system but cannot take calls. Customers with flooded homes are getting a dead line, and local radio has started asking why. Your contract’s service credit is worth one month’s fees. What is your plan for the next eight hours?
A federal research sponsor's security office calls your university: data from a funded propulsion project has appeared on a foreign technical forum, including test results that were only ever stored on a lab's shared drive and one researcher's cloud storage account. Central IT has never managed that lab's servers. A postdoc's account shows logins from two countries within the same hour, repeatedly, over six months. The principal investigator says the lab follows every rule. Some of the data may be export-controlled, and the contract has a 72-hour cyber-incident reporting clause. When did that clock start?
At 05:00 on a Wednesday, your logistics company's warehouse management and transport management systems go dark across six distribution centres. Ransom notes are on the servers. Forty trucks are queued at the gates, the handheld scanners cannot print labels, and a pharmaceutical customer has temperature-controlled stock that must ship by 14:00. Customs declarations for two ports are filed from the same encrypted system. Your largest retail customer's contract has a penalty clause for missed delivery windows. The operations director wants to restart on paper. Can you, and what has to be true first?
Your project-management SaaS has been degraded for six hours. Officially the cause is 'database performance'. In reality the security team took two clusters offline after finding an attacker's web shell on an API server, and nobody yet knows whether customer data was accessed. The public status page still shows a yellow 'degraded' banner. Enterprise customers are asking about SLA credits, two have asked outright whether this is a security incident, and one has a contractual 48-hour breach-notice clause. Sales wants the status page to say 'scheduled maintenance'. What does the status page say now?
You run IT for a mid-sized water utility in the EU, classed as an essential entity under NIS2. At 06:30 monitoring shows that the remote-access gateway used by contractors has been accepting logins from an unfamiliar country for two nights, and the telemetry server it reaches is behaving oddly. Nothing has failed, and operations say pumping is normal. The national CSIRT expects an early warning within 24 hours of becoming aware of a significant incident. Is this significant, when did the clock start, and who sends it?
A government agency privately tells your aerospace components firm that an intruder linked to a foreign intelligence service has been in your engineering network for about eight months. They share three indicators and ask you not to tip off the attacker. Your logs go back 90 days. The intruder appears to use legitimate admin tools rather than malware. Your largest customer is a defence prime with contractual reporting duties. Do you watch, or evict? And what do you tell anyone?