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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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?
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 senior account executive resigned on Friday and joins a direct competitor in two weeks. On Monday, a data loss alert shows she synced 4,000 files to a personal cloud account over the weekend, including a full CRM export, pricing models and the customer contract folder. She is on garden leave but still has a working laptop and VPN access. Her manager insists she is trustworthy and that this is 'just her portfolio'. Legal wants to act before anything reaches the competitor. What do you do, and in what order?
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?
It is 10:40 on a Tuesday. A secret-scanning service emails your security inbox: a long-lived access key for your production deployment account was pushed to a public code repository 47 minutes ago, from a contractor's personal fork. The key has administrator rights. Your cloud audit log shows calls made with that key in the last ten minutes from an address nobody recognises, and the release pipeline uses the same key for tonight's deploy. The contractor is not answering their phone. What do you do in the next fifteen minutes?
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.
Your platform team moved CI to keyless federated identity last quarter: pipelines exchange a signed token for a short-lived cloud deploy role. Tonight the SOC sees that role assumed 31 times in two hours. The token claims name a repository under an organisation you have never heard of. The trust policy, it turns out, checks the identity provider but not which organisation the token comes from. Using the role, someone has created two new identities, read your secrets store and changed a load balancer rule in production. Nothing has failed yet. Where do you cut, and what do you trust after?
The finance team forwards a billing alert at 08:15: your cloud spend for the last 24 hours is $182,400 against a usual $3,000. The cloud team finds hundreds of large GPU instances running in four regions you have never used. They were launched from the root account of a development tenancy that nobody has logged into for a year. Its recovery email points to a former employee's personal address. Your provider's support line says a credit "may be considered" once you secure the account. The instances are still running and costing roughly $7,500 an hour.
Your team has spent six hours on an active intrusion in production: an attacker with a stolen engineer session is moving between services, and you are close to cutting them off. At 16:05 your cloud provider posts a major incident for your primary region. Half your services are unreachable, including the logging pipeline and the identity console you were using to contain the attacker. Customers are calling. Your disaster-recovery runbook says to fail over to the secondary region, which is built from the same templates and secrets the attacker may have already read. Do you fail over?
A public advisory says a popular open-source logging package was hijacked: version 4.8.2, published three days ago, runs a post-install script that reads environment variables and sends them to a remote server. Your dependency manifests allow minor updates. A quick search shows 14 of your repositories pulled 4.8.2, and your CI runners, which hold cloud deploy credentials, package registry tokens and a signing key in their environment, built every one of them, many times. Two developers also installed it on their laptops. What do you assume was taken?
A release engineer runs a reproducible-build check on tomorrow's release and it fails: the compiled agent your customers install on 40,000 endpoints contains a 3 KB block that is not in any commit. Rebuilding on a clean machine gives a different hash. The build server's scheduled tasks include a script nobody recognises, created five weeks ago. Your last two releases came off the same server and are already in customers' hands. Release is scheduled for 09:00 tomorrow and the sales team has promised the new version to your largest customer.
A customer's security team calls your CISO at 07:30. Their EDR flagged your desktop agent, version 9.4.1, released nine days ago and signed with your code-signing certificate, making outbound connections to a domain registered last month. Your engineers confirm the binary contains code that is not in your repository. Telemetry says 3,100 customer organisations have installed 9.4.1, including hospitals and two government agencies. The customer says they will post their findings publicly at noon. Your auto-update service is still offering 9.4.1 right now.
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.
Your EDR raises a medium-severity alert on a senior developer's laptop: an unsigned executable launched from the downloads folder, then deleted itself. The developer says they installed a "free licence key generator" for a design tool on Saturday. It is now Monday. Since Saturday, their code-hosting session, their cloud console session and their password manager browser extension have all been used from an IP address in another country, with no multi-factor prompts, because the attacker replayed session cookies. The developer has admin rights on 60 repositories. Where do you start?
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.
Forty of your engineers use AI coding assistants connected to a community-built Model Context Protocol server that adds database and ticketing tools. A researcher's blog post says version 2.3 of that server added hidden instructions in its tool descriptions that tell the assistant to read local environment files and include them in a "telemetry" call. The update arrived automatically two weeks ago. Your engineers' laptops hold cloud credentials, database passwords and customer test data. Your egress logs show the telemetry domain was contacted 9,200 times. What do you assume, 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 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?
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?
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?
It is 09:00 on Black Friday at an online homeware retailer that takes 18% of its annual revenue in the next four days. Requests to the checkout API jump to 40 times normal, response times pass ten seconds and the site starts returning errors. An email arrives at the press address: pay 5 bitcoin or the site stays down all weekend. Your CDN has basic DDoS protection, but the checkout API sits outside it on a separate hostname. Marketing has a promotional email going to 3 million customers at 10:00. What do you do in the next hour?
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?
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?
Your acquiring bank emails: card-fraud analysis links 212 fraudulent transactions to cards used on your online store over the past five weeks, and they want a forensic investigation. Your developers find nothing changed in your own code. Then a front-end engineer notices the checkout page loads a chat widget from a vendor's CDN, and the script now contains 40 extra lines of obfuscated JavaScript that post form fields to an unfamiliar domain. The widget is on every page, including payment. Peak-season trading starts in nine days. What do you remove, what do you keep, and what do you tell the bank?
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?
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 federal research sponsor's security office calls your university: data from a funded propulsion project has appeared on a foreign technical forum, including test results that were only ever stored on a lab's shared drive and one researcher's cloud storage account. Central IT has never managed that lab's servers. A postdoc's account shows logins from two countries within the same hour, repeatedly, over six months. The principal investigator says the lab follows every rule. Some of the data may be export-controlled, and the contract has a 72-hour cyber-incident reporting clause. When did that clock start?
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.
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?
Your project-management SaaS has been degraded for six hours. Officially the cause is 'database performance'. In reality the security team took two clusters offline after finding an attacker's web shell on an API server, and nobody yet knows whether customer data was accessed. The public status page still shows a yellow 'degraded' banner. Enterprise customers are asking about SLA credits, two have asked outright whether this is a security incident, and one has a contractual 48-hour breach-notice clause. Sales wants the status page to say 'scheduled maintenance'. What does the status page say 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.
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.
You signed the agreement to buy a regional medical-billing company three weeks ago. Closing is in five weeks, pending regulatory approval. This morning the target's CEO calls: ransomware hit them overnight and patient billing records may have been taken. Your security team wants to send people in to help. Your lawyers warn that you cannot run the target's business before close. The agreement has a material adverse effect clause, and your board meets in four days. What do you do, and what are you allowed to do?
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.
At 10:20 your SOC escalates a confirmed business email compromise: an attacker in the CFO's mailbox has redirected a 1.3 million dollar supplier payment due to leave at 15:00. At 10:35 a second escalation: crypto-mining containers are running in production Kubernetes after a leaked deploy token, and the same token can push images. You have four incident responders, one of them on leave, and a retainer firm that can send two people tomorrow. Who works on what first?