Incident Response Tabletop Exercise: A Safe Way to Test Your Organization’s Response To Cyber Attacks
In today’s modern world, businesses have begun to take advantage of what the digital space offers to get an advantage over their competitors. This has become more evident ever since the pandemic hit as most businesses made their employees do their work from home.
But as businesses move to the digital space, cybercrime also became more prevalent than before. That is why if you are a businessman, it would be best to prepare your organization for such threats, and the best way to do this is to conduct an Incident Response Tabletop Exercise.
What is an Incident Response Tabletop Exercise?
To prepare employees for a cyber-attack, you and your organization must make a Cyber Incident Response Plan or “IR Plan”. This plan will ideally be short and straight to the point so everyone can understand them clearly. In addition, it will tell each department or employee what their role will be if ever a cyber-attack occurs.
But the question is, how do you know how well these plans will work? And that is where Incident Response Tabletop Exercises come in. Because it performs cyber-attack simulation drills to your organization, you can see how well your stakeholders and employees act and think if a real cyber-attack happens.
Benefits of Incident Response Exercises
As you can imagine, there can be many benefits you can gain by preparing your business for cyber-attacks, but if you are still having doubts, below are some of the reasons other businesses like to do an incident response exercise.
It tells you how prepared your organization is
You can never really tell how good you are at something if you don’t try and see it for yourself, or unless you can see in the future (which is impossible). Your IR plan will only be as good as the capability of your organization. So by doing an Incident Response Tabletop Exercise, you will see how well your employees will be able to follow your IR plan.
Builds muscle memory
If ever a cyber-attack occurs, you will need to address it as quickly as possible. The longer the attack is, the more problems can occur, leading to you losing money. An incident response exercise will make sure that your employees know the IR plan by heart, and so when a cyber-attack occurs, they will be quick to respond to it.
It checks how well your IR plans are
You might think that your organization is well prepared to tackle any cyber-attack out there, but everyday cybercriminals are also improving their skills to counter your security. And if you do not update your plans, it might not equip you to handle new computer viruses and malwares.
So to check how well your IR plans are against new threats, you will need to do an incident response exercise. Then, if there are ever problems, you will be able to address them immediately, and not after a real attack has already occurred.
Assesses if you are putting enough budget in your IR tech and infrastructure
Another thing that is important other than the people who respond to these cyber-attacks is the technology and infrastructure that your organization is using. Your employees will not be able to properly respond if the technology they are using is low tier.
So if you notice that your IR plan needs a technological upgrade, you might need to allocate more budgets for it.
Should you perform tabletop exercise regularly?
Short answer, YES! Especially if you are handling a large business. The question for a cyber-attack is not if you will be a target by it, but how you will handle it when it happens. Unfortunately, cybercriminals will not tell you when they will attack, so it is a must that your organization is always prepared to handle any threats if they occur.
Conclusion
With cybercrime becoming more prevalent, new threats can occur at any time in the digital space. So it would be best to make sure that your organization is always prepared to handle them. With the help of an Incident Response Tabletop Exercise, you will be able to highlight the strengths and areas that need improvements in your IR plan so you can always be one step ahead of cybercriminals.