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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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 Wednesday morning and 2,600 staff are due to be paid on Friday. Your outsourced payroll provider has been offline since last night. Its status page says "investigating a security incident affecting some systems" and gives no recovery time. Your payroll team cannot submit the final run, and the provider has the only copy of this month's calculated pay, tax and deductions. Social media already has posts from employees at other companies using the same provider. Your union representative has asked HR whether pay will arrive on time. The CEO wants a decision by noon.
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.
On Monday a finance manager joined a video call with what looked and sounded like your CEO and CFO, plus an "external lawyer". They explained a confidential acquisition and asked for three urgent payments to an escrow account, totalling $2.4 million. The manager made the payments after a follow-up email from the CEO's real address, sent through a compromised mail rule. Today the real CEO asks why finance moved money on a deal that does not exist. Your bank says the first transfer has left the receiving bank. The finance manager is distraught.
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?
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?
At 19:45 on a Friday your company’s main social media account, with 450,000 followers, posts a video of your CEO announcing a giveaway: send cryptocurrency and receive double back. The video is a deepfake. Three more posts follow in ten minutes, and replies show customers who have already sent money. The social media manager is locked out because the account’s email and phone number have been changed. Nobody else knows who holds the recovery codes. The platform’s support form promises a reply within 48 hours. What do you do now?
On Tuesday morning a post on a hacking forum claims to offer the ‘full database of a national pet-insurance company, 4 million customers’ and shares a 200-row sample. Within two hours it is on social media, a tech news site asks for comment, and your share price falls 6% at the open. Your security team checks the sample: the rows are real customers, but the fields match an old marketing list a former partner held, not your systems. Your logs show no intrusion so far. Customers are calling to cancel. How sure do you need to be before you say ‘we were not breached’?
A journalist emails your communications team at 16:10 on a Thursday. She has a screenshot of a leak-site post naming your 22-clinic outpatient group, with a sample file of 300 patient records: names, dates of birth, diagnoses and insurance numbers. The post claims 1.2 million records and gives you five days before full publication. Your security team has seen no ransomware and no obvious intrusion. The journalist wants comment by 18:00 and says two patients have already contacted her. You do not yet know whether the data is real, current or even yours. What happens before 18:00?
It is Sunday morning at a regional bank with 600,000 retail customers. Fraud operations reports 1,400 instant payments in 18 hours from customer accounts to newly added payees, most just under the daily limit, about $3.1 million in total. Every payment passed one-time-passcode checks. Social media is filling with customers whose balances are zero, and the call-centre queue is 90 minutes. The digital banking team suspects SIM swaps or a phishing kit; nobody has confirmed either. Turning off instant payments to new payees stops the fraud, and it also stops legitimate rent and wage payments. Do you pull the switch?
At 09:31 on the morning of a major interest-rate announcement, your online brokerage's order-entry service starts returning errors. Customers can log in and see positions but cannot place or cancel orders. Traffic is four times a normal day. A configuration change to the order-routing gateway went out at 08:50, and the network team is also seeing a surge from a few thousand IP addresses that could be a DDoS or could be your own customers' apps retrying. Customers with open positions are posting angrily on social media. Roll back, scale out or block traffic? You have one move to make first.
It is 20:05 on Black Friday. Your online retailer's checkout has been failing for 18 minutes; about one payment attempt in three times out. The promotional email to 2.4 million customers went out at 20:00. Revenue for this hour last year was $1.9 million. Engineering thinks the payment provider is rate-limiting you; the payment provider says its systems are healthy. Social media has noticed, and a competitor has just extended its own sale by an hour. The CEO has joined the bridge and wants to know whether to pause the promotion. What do you decide in the next ten minutes?
Two days before a municipal election, a 40-second audio clip spreads on social media. It sounds like your county's chief election official telling a colleague that ballots from two precincts 'will be handled differently this year'. A second post, styled like your website, says three polling places have moved. Your official never said this, and nothing has moved. By noon the clip has 300,000 plays, your phone lines are jammed, and a candidate is demanding an explanation. Your public results website is also seeing unusual traffic. How do you respond without amplifying the fake?
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.
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.
Your accounting software company refused a ransom demand last week after a data theft. This morning hundreds of your small-business customers received an email from the attacker. It quotes each customer's own invoice data as proof, says you 'chose not to protect them', and invites them to pay 500 dollars each to have their records deleted. Support has 900 tickets in the queue. Two customers have posted the email on social media, and one says they have already paid.