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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Pick the people you have — we'll suggest exercises that fit them.
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.
It is 05:40 on a Monday at a 900-person auto-parts manufacturer running three shifts. Office laptops started showing ransom notes an hour ago. Now the night-shift supervisor reports that two HMI screens on the stamping line show the same note, and the historian server has stopped updating. The PLCs are still running and the presses are still making parts, but operators can no longer see process values on screen. The first shift arrives in 80 minutes. Do you keep the line running blind, shut it down, or cut the plant off from the corporate network first?
At 02:15 the HMI at a regional dairy shows the pasteuriser hold-tube temperature setpoint has moved from 72.5°C to 68.0°C. Nobody on the night shift admits to changing it. The change log names the engineering workstation's shared login, and that workstation sits in a locked, empty office. The flow-diversion valve worked and no under-temperature milk left the line, but 9,000 litres are now held in a silo pending a decision. The morning tanker leaves at 06:00. Was this an attacker, a scheduled job or a mistake, and how do you find out without destroying the evidence?
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?
You are on day two of investigating suspicious traffic inside the control network of a chemical blending plant. Responders have a laptop on the OT switch capturing packets. At 14:20 the safety instrumented system trips reactor R-3 on high pressure, venting to the flare and closing the feed valves. The control room saw the pressure transmitter spike, but two field gauges read normal throughout. Operators want to reset the safety system and restart the batch, which is worth $400,000. The responders want the safety controller left untouched until they know whether anyone has reached it. Who decides?
You run a municipal water utility serving 38,000 people. At 11:05 an operator watches the cursor move across the SCADA screen on its own and raise the sodium hydroxide dosing setpoint from 90 to 5,400 parts per million. He resets it within a minute, and downstream pH alarms would have caught it before treated water reached a tap. The workstation runs remote-access software installed years ago so the on-call operator could work from home. The mayor’s office has already heard about it from a council member. Do you tell the public, and what do you say?
A finance manager at a 600-person logistics company reports on Monday morning that her bag, with her access badge inside, was stolen from her car on Saturday night. She did not report it over the weekend. The access-control log shows her badge opened the side entrance at 03:12 on Sunday and the server room door at 03:16, a room she has never had reason to enter and should not have been able to open. The camera covering that corridor has pointed at the ceiling since a refit two months ago. What do you do in the next hour?
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?
Your SOC flags outbound connections from 40 networked infusion pumps on the oncology and intensive care floors to an IP address in a hosting range nobody recognises. The traffic started after last week's vendor maintenance visit. As far as nursing staff can tell, the pumps are still delivering medication normally. The manufacturer's support line says a patch is 'in validation' and will not commit to a date. Clinical engineering owns the pumps, IT owns the network, and the vendor holds the admin passwords. Pulling the pumps means moving patients to manual pumps you do not have enough of. What do you do in the next hour?
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 food-packaging plant runs three shifts and produces about $95,000 of product an hour. At 10:00 the SOC confirms ransomware on the corporate network and finds the same malware on one engineering workstation that can reach the lines' controllers. The lines are running normally. Isolating the plant network means losing the production schedule and batch records held in IT systems and running on paper at reduced output. A full shutdown is safest and costs more every hour. A major customer's promotion depends on next week's shipments. The board chair wants options and numbers by 13:00.
Day two of a ransomware outage at a 2,000-person logistics company. Dispatch, billing and the warehouse system are encrypted. The attacker wants 4.2 million dollars in cryptocurrency, offers a 20% discount if you pay within 48 hours, and has published a sample of stolen payroll files. IT says restoring from backup will take nine to fourteen days, and two of the backup sets have not been verified clean. The insurer's panel negotiator is on the line. The CEO turns to the room and asks for a recommendation by 17:00.
Three weeks after a ransomware attack, your company has spent 1.8 million on forensics, overtime and lost revenue. The insurer's coverage letter arrives. It reserves its rights and cites two problems. The application you signed last year stated that multi-factor authentication was enforced for all remote access, but the attacker came in through a legacy VPN account without it. And a war and state-actor exclusion may apply, because a government advisory linked the ransomware group to a hostile state. Finance needs to know what to book this quarter.
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.
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?