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Exercise library · Incident response

Tabletop exercise library

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.

Who's in the room?

Pick the people you have — we'll suggest exercises that fit them.
Executive
Business
Technical

Matching exercises

16 of 100
Data breachIntermediateMixed 2 h

Your customer database is for sale on a forum

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?

  • CISO / Head of security
  • Incident response lead
  • Cloud engineer
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Communications / PR
  • CEO / Managing director
Open exercise
Data breachAdvancedExecutive 2 h 30 min

One breach, five notification clocks

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?

  • Legal counsel
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • CISO / Head of security
  • CEO / Managing director
  • Board member
  • Communications / PR
  • CFO / Finance
Open exercise
CloudIntermediateMixed 1 h 45 min

A researcher finds your customer exports in a public storage bucket

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.

  • CISO / Head of security
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Cloud engineer
  • Communications / PR
  • Customer support
Open exercise
CloudStarterMixed 1 h 30 min

A cloud bill jumps by $180,000 overnight

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.

  • Cloud engineer
  • CISO / Head of security
  • CFO / Finance
  • CIO / CTO
  • Incident response lead
Open exercise
Third partyIntermediateMixed 1 h 45 min

Your help-desk SaaS provider is breached and its tokens into your systems are stolen

Your help-desk software provider emails all customers at 18:00: an attacker accessed its production environment and "may have obtained" OAuth tokens that customers granted for integrations. Your instance has integrations with your CRM, your file-sharing platform and your code host, all granted with broad scopes two years ago by someone who has since left. The provider's notice gives no indicators, no timeline and a link to a status page. Your support team has 4,000 open tickets, many with customer attachments. The provider's account manager is not answering.

  • Vendor / procurement manager
  • CISO / Head of security
  • SOC analyst
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Customer support
  • Legal counsel
Open exercise
AI systemIntermediateMixed 1 h 45 min

Your customer-support chatbot is tricked into revealing other customers' data

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.

  • CISO / Head of security
  • Developer / DevOps
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Customer support
  • Communications / PR
  • Legal counsel
  • Incident response lead
Open exercise
OT / ICSIntermediateMixed 2 h

The vendor you let into the plant has been breached

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?

  • OT / plant engineer
  • Vendor / procurement manager
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Incident response lead
  • IT operations
  • Legal counsel
Open exercise
InsiderStarterTechnical 1 h 15 min

A cleanup script deletes a third of the customer records

At 16:30 on a Thursday a developer at a 200-person subscription software company runs a data-retention cleanup script against what he believes is the staging database. It is production. Before he kills it, the script has deleted 38% of customer account records and their linked invoices. The app is still up, but thousands of customers now see empty accounts or ‘user not found’. Support tickets are arriving at 40 a minute. The last full backup finished at 02:00. Nobody acted maliciously. How do you get the data back, and what do you tell customers?

  • Developer / DevOps
  • Cloud engineer
  • Incident response lead
  • Customer support
  • CIO / CTO
  • Communications / PR
Open exercise
Outage / resilienceAdvancedTechnical 2 h 15 min

Your domain is hijacked at the registrar

At 07:10 customers of a 700-person online bank start reporting that the login page looks slightly wrong and asks for their one-time passcode twice. Your engineers find the domain’s name servers were changed overnight through the registrar’s web portal, using a staff account protected only by a password and SMS codes. DNS now points to attacker-controlled servers, and a certificate for your login hostname was issued to someone else at 03:40. Some resolvers still have the old records cached. The registrar’s support line opens at 09:00. How do you take your domain back, and what do you tell customers?

  • IT operations
  • Incident response lead
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Cloud engineer
  • Vendor / procurement manager
  • Communications / PR
  • Legal counsel
Open exercise
CrisisStarterMixed 1 h

Your brand’s social account starts promoting a crypto scam

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?

  • Communications / PR
  • CISO / Head of security
  • IT operations
  • Legal counsel
  • Customer support
Open exercise
OT / ICSIntermediateTechnical 1 h 45 min

Networked infusion pumps start talking to an unknown host

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?

  • Incident response lead
  • OT / plant engineer
  • SOC analyst
  • IT operations
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Vendor / procurement manager
Open exercise
IdentityStarterMixed 1 h 15 min

Credential stuffing empties loyalty-points balances

Customer support at your 300-store grocery and pharmacy chain has logged 900 complaints in two days: loyalty points gone, redeemed for gift cards online and at self-checkout. Login traffic to the loyalty app is twelve times normal, mostly from residential proxy addresses, with a success rate of about 2%. That is roughly 18,000 accounts accessed. Points are not money in your accounts, but customers treat them as money, and the accounts also hold home addresses and pharmacy pickup history. Marketing launches a double-points promotion on Monday. What do you do first?

  • CISO / Head of security
  • SOC analyst
  • Customer support
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Communications / PR
  • CFO / Finance
Open exercise
Data breachStarterMixed 1 h 15 min

Student records leak from a school district's hosted information system

A parent forwards your district office an email from someone claiming to hold the records of every student in your 14-school district: names, addresses, grades, special-education plans and medical notes. Attached is a spreadsheet with her own child's details, correct as of last month. Your student information system is hosted by a vendor, and their support desk says they are 'looking into an incident affecting several customers'. The superintendent has a school board meeting tonight, and the local parents' group online already has 200 comments. What do you tell parents before the meeting?

  • CEO / Managing director
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Vendor / procurement manager
  • Communications / PR
  • CISO / Head of security
Open exercise
DevSecOps / supply chainAdvancedTechnical 2 h 30 min

A tenant-isolation bug shows customers each other's data

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?

  • Incident response lead
  • Developer / DevOps
  • Cloud engineer
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • Legal counsel
  • Customer support
Open exercise
CrisisStarterExecutive 1 h 15 min

A law firm announces it is 'investigating' your breach

Four days after you notified 210,000 customers that their names, addresses and loyalty account details were exposed, a plaintiffs' law firm publishes a press release saying it is investigating claims against your retail chain and inviting affected customers to get in touch. A demand letter citing a state privacy statute arrives the next day. Customer support is fielding calls asking whether people should join. Your forensic firm is still finishing its report. What gets written down now may be read in court later.

  • Legal counsel
  • CEO / Managing director
  • Communications / PR
  • Customer support
  • CISO / Head of security
  • CFO / Finance
Open exercise
Data breachIntermediateMixed 1 h 30 min

The attacker emails your customers directly

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.

  • Communications / PR
  • Customer support
  • CISO / Head of security
  • Legal counsel
  • Privacy officer / DPO
  • CEO / Managing director
  • Incident response lead
Open exercise
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