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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At 22:47 a payables clerk receives 31 MFA push requests in eight minutes. On the 32nd, half asleep, she taps Approve. By the time she reports it next morning, the account has signed in from a hosting provider, registered a new MFA device and created an inbox rule that moves any email containing 'invoice' or 'payment' to an obscure folder. Two supplier payment runs are scheduled for 11:00 today. Your SOC saw the overnight push alert and closed it as user error. What do you do before 11:00?
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.
At 00:01 on the first of the month, card payments at a 300-store pharmacy chain start failing. Tills show ‘connection error’ and the mobile app cannot place orders. Within twenty minutes the on-call engineer finds the cause: the TLS certificate on the internal payment gateway expired at midnight. Nobody knew it existed. The engineer who installed it left two years ago, and the renewal reminders went to his old mailbox. Issuing a new certificate needs approval from someone who is asleep. Stores open at 07:00. How do you fix it tonight, and how do you find the next one?
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 07:15 on a Tuesday, your EU payment institution loses its core transaction database after a fault at the cloud provider that hosts it. Card authorisations are failing for about 40% of merchants across four member states. The provider's status page says 'degraded performance' and gives no estimate. By 09:00 your service desk has logged 2,300 merchant complaints. Your head of compliance asks the question nobody has answered yet: is this a major ICT-related incident under DORA, and if so, when did the clock start? The CEO wants to know what goes to the regulator, and when.
Friday, 18:20. A correspondent bank calls your payments operations desk about three outbound cross-border transfers sent in the last two hours: $4.2 million, $6.8 million and $9.5 million, to beneficiaries in three countries you rarely deal with. The messages were authenticated through your own payment messaging gateway using two valid operator accounts, one belonging to someone on leave. The daily reconciliation that would have caught them runs at 22:00, and today's printed confirmation report shows nothing unusual. Some of the funds may already have been credited. Who calls whom first, and what do you switch off?
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?
Your company is six weeks from signing an agreement to buy a 300-person payments start-up. During security due diligence your team finds credentials for the target's production cloud account for sale on a criminal marketplace, dated four months ago. The founders say they had 'a minor incident' that was handled and that no notifications were needed. Their logs only go back 30 days. The deal team wants a recommendation this week: walk away, reprice, add protections in the agreement, or demand an independent investigation first.