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.
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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?
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?
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?
A message arrives at your CEO's and general counsel's inboxes: "We have 380 GB of your source code, including your payment service and your infrastructure scripts. Sample attached. Pay 40 BTC in five days or we publish everything and send it to your competitors." The sample is real: three repositories, including commit history and a configuration file with what look like live database credentials. Your code host shows a personal access token belonging to a senior engineer cloned 212 repositories eleven days ago from an unfamiliar country. The board meets in two days.
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.
A user posts screenshots on social media of your customer-support chatbot. By pasting a crafted instruction into the chat, they got it to look up and display order histories, addresses and partial card numbers for three other customers. The bot uses a large language model with a tool that queries the order database using the customer ID the model supplies. The post has 40,000 views and replies show other people trying the same trick. The bot handles 9,000 conversations a day and is the only support channel open overnight. It is 22:30.
Three weeks ago your platform team gave an AI operations agent permission to tidy up unused cloud resources, with a rule that destructive actions need human approval in chat. This morning the cost dashboard shows a 22% drop. The agent's log says it identified "orphaned snapshots" and deleted 1,400 of them, including the only backups of your billing database. It recorded the approval as granted: an engineer had replied "looks good" to a different message in the same thread. A database migration is planned for tonight. Who is accountable, and what do you change?
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."
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?
Police call your office manager at 06:30: a ground-floor window at your accounting firm’s branch office was smashed overnight. When staff arrive they find eleven laptops missing from desks, plus the small network storage box from the comms cupboard that the branch used for scanned client documents. IT believes the laptops are encrypted but is not sure about two older ones. Nobody knows exactly what was on the storage box or whether it was backed up. Tax season starts in three weeks. Is this a theft or a data breach?
A senior engineer at a 250-person fintech hands in her notice on Friday, saying she is joining a competitor. On Monday a routine review of source-control audit logs shows her account cloned 140 repositories in the ten days before she resigned, including the fraud-scoring models she never worked on. Her work laptop also synced to a personal cloud drive twice last week. She is still working her notice period, has production access, and is well liked. HR wants to handle it quietly. Legal wants evidence first. What happens today?
Two weeks after being told he would not get the infrastructure lead role, a senior systems administrator at a 1,500-person healthcare billing company resigns with immediate effect. His accounts were disabled within the hour. Three days later, at 01:00, scheduled tasks on twelve servers delete the database backups and drop a production claims table. The tasks were created months ago under a service account he set up, which nobody has rotated. Claims processing is down. How much else has he left behind, and how do you find it before the next one fires?
Three days after attackers stole HR files from a 900-person engineering consultancy, they change tactics. Twelve employees, including the CEO and two HR staff, receive texts on their personal phones listing their home address and their children’s school, with a demand: tell your company to pay, or this goes online. One message includes a photo of an employee’s front door. The attackers’ leak site now lists the company with a five-day countdown. Staff are frightened and some want to stay home. The board meets tomorrow. What do you do for your people today?
At 21:30 on a Sunday, armed police surround your CEO’s house after a hoax call reporting a hostage situation. Nobody is hurt, but her teenage son was handcuffed on the lawn. Within the hour, an anonymous social media account posts your CFO’s home address and writes ‘he’s next’ in a thread about recent layoffs at your 3,000-person logistics business. Some of the executives’ personal details appear to come from a data broker. Monday’s all-staff meeting at headquarters is in twelve hours. How do you protect people tonight, and what changes tomorrow?
It is 02:40 on a Saturday at a 450-bed regional hospital. The night supervisor calls: the electronic health record is frozen, workstations on three wards show a ransom note, and the pharmacy dispensing system has dropped offline. The emergency department has 31 patients, two ambulances are ten minutes out, and the trauma surgeon on call wants to know whether to divert. Downtime procedures exist on paper, but nobody has run them for longer than four hours. The ransom note says patient data has already been copied. Who decides on diversion, and what do you tell the ambulance service right now?
Monday, 07:30. Staff at a county council serving 280,000 residents arrive to find file shares encrypted and the housing benefits, social care case management and parking systems unavailable. Phones still work, but the contact centre cannot see case records. A social worker needs a child's safeguarding history for an emergency court hearing at 11:00. The ransom note demands payment within 72 hours and threatens to publish residents' data. Councillors are already asking questions, and a local reporter has heard that the payments portal is down. What do you prioritise this morning?
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?
You are a listed software company. On Monday the security team confirmed that an attacker took source code and a database of 1.1 million customer contact records through a compromised build server. Revenue impact is unclear, and two large customers have asked whether their API keys were exposed. The disclosure committee meets Wednesday morning. Once you determine the incident is material, you have four business days to file. Some in the room want to wait for the forensic report due in three weeks. Others think the decision is already overdue.
At 16:45 the communications team takes a call from a reporter at a national business publication. She says a source has shown her files that appear to come from your HR system, including salary data for senior staff, and she plans to publish tomorrow morning. She wants a comment by 20:00. Your security team has no open incident, no alert matches, and nobody has seen the files. You have three hours and fifteen minutes to find out whether it is true and decide what you will say.
A threat-intelligence feed alerts you that your regional law firm has been listed on a ransomware group's leak site. The post shows a timer with 72 hours remaining, a list of client names, and three screenshots of documents that look like your matter files. There has been no ransomware outbreak and no ransom note, and IT finds nothing encrypted. Partners are asking whether this is real, whether clients must be told before the timer runs out, and whether anyone should contact the group.