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Exercise library · Incident response

Tabletop exercise library

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.

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Executive
Business
Technical

Matching exercises

9 of 100
Data breachIntermediateMixed 2 h

Your customer database is for sale on a forum

A security researcher messages your support inbox with a link. On a criminal forum, someone is selling what they call your full customer database: 1.2 million rows with names, emails, password hashes and the last four digits of cards, for $8,000. The 20-row sample contains real customers, and one is a member of your own staff. Nothing in your logs points to a breach. An engineer remembers a copy of production restored onto a test server for a migration two years ago. The researcher plans to publish a blog post on Friday. Where do you start?

  • CISO / Head of security
  • Incident response lead
  • Cloud engineer
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Communications / PR
  • CEO / Managing director
Open exercise
Data breachStarterMixed 1 h

A spreadsheet of staff data sent to the wrong person

An HR coordinator meant to email a salary review spreadsheet to the payroll provider. Autocomplete picked a similar name at a recruitment agency instead. The file holds names, salaries, home addresses and sickness absence notes for 340 employees. An hour later the recipient replied: 'I think this was meant for someone else.' The coordinator is panicking and has asked a friend in IT to 'just recall it'. It is now 16:30 on a Thursday. What happens next, and who needs to know?

  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • HR
  • Legal counsel
  • CISO / Head of security
  • IT operations
Open exercise
Data breachStarterMixed 1 h 15 min

Lost laptop with HR files at an airport

A regional HR manager reports on Monday morning that she left her laptop in an airport security tray on Friday evening. She waited because she hoped the airport would find it. The device management console shows it last checked in on Saturday at 09:12 from an unknown home network. Disk encryption shows 'pending' because a policy change was never completed on her model. The laptop held disciplinary files and a local copy of an investigation into a senior manager. What do you do first, and is this a notifiable breach?

  • IT operations
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • HR
  • Legal counsel
  • CISO / Head of security
Open exercise
Data breachAdvancedExecutive 2 h 30 min

One breach, five notification clocks

Your investigation confirms that an attacker had access to a customer support platform for 19 days. It held records for 210,000 people across the EU, the UK, California, Texas and Australia, and some records include government ID numbers. The company is listed in the US and provides services to several EU banks. Outside counsel joins at 10:00 and lays out at least five deadlines, some measured from 'awareness' and some from 'determination'. The board chair wants to know when this becomes public. When did each clock start, and what goes out first?

  • Legal counsel
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • CISO / Head of security
  • CEO / Managing director
  • Board member
  • Communications / PR
  • CFO / Finance
Open exercise
CloudIntermediateMixed 1 h 45 min

A researcher finds your customer exports in a public storage bucket

A security researcher emails your support address on a Friday afternoon. They have found a cloud storage bucket, publicly listable, that holds nightly CSV exports from your customer platform: names, email addresses, phone numbers and partial payment details for roughly 210,000 customers in the EU, UK and US. They attach a screenshot of the file list and say they will publish a write-up in seven days. Your cloud team confirms the bucket is yours and was made public eighteen months ago for a one-off analytics project. Access logging on it was never switched on.

  • CISO / Head of security
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Cloud engineer
  • Communications / PR
  • Customer support
Open exercise
Third partyStarterExecutive 1 h 20 min

A vendor holding your customer data appears on a leak site

A threat-intelligence feed your team subscribes to posts a new entry: a ransomware group claims to have stolen 600 GB from a small order-fulfilment company. You use that company to ship orders, and you send it customer names, addresses, phone numbers and order contents every day. The listing includes a file tree with a folder named after your brand. The vendor has not contacted you. When you call, the owner says they "had a computer problem last week" and that their IT provider is handling it. You are the data controller for those customers.

  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Vendor / procurement manager
  • Legal counsel
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Communications / PR
  • Customer support
Open exercise
DevSecOps / supply chainAdvancedTechnical 2 h 30 min

A tenant-isolation bug shows customers each other's data

A customer of your 400-person HR software company opens a support ticket with a screenshot: their dashboard search returned salary records belonging to another customer's employees. Engineering traces it to a caching change deployed nine days ago that sometimes keys results by query text instead of by tenant. Logs show the faulty path ran at least 6,000 times, but nobody yet knows how many of those responses held another tenant's data, or which tenants saw what. You process data for 1,100 business customers, most of them in the EU and UK. The fix is ready. Do you ship it now?

  • Incident response lead
  • Developer / DevOps
  • Cloud engineer
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Customer support
Open exercise
Data breachIntermediateMixed 2 h

Five notification clocks start at once

A misconfigured analytics export at your online learning company exposed records for 640,000 students and staff in the EU, the UK, the United States, Canada and Australia. Fields include names, email addresses, dates of birth and, for 12,000 US users, partial payment data. You confirmed the exposure at 09:00 today. Each jurisdiction has different triggers, deadlines and regulators, and some of your customers are universities that are controllers in their own right. Counsel wants a single notification plan by end of day.

  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Communications / PR
  • Customer support
  • Cloud engineer
Open exercise
Data breachIntermediateMixed 1 h 30 min

The regulator writes after a public leak

A security researcher posted on social media that your insurance comparison site had left a storage bucket of 80,000 quote applications open to the internet. You closed it within an hour and decided, after a quick assessment, that it did not need to be notified. Eleven days later a letter arrives from the data protection authority. It asks when you became aware, who accessed the data, why you did not notify, and for a copy of your breach register entry. Replies are due in 14 days. Your breach register entry is two lines long.

  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Cloud engineer
  • Communications / PR
  • CEO / Managing director
Open exercise
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