IT IS NOT PRACTICE, IT IS PREVENTION
Cybersecurity has two primary objectives: protecting your organization from internal and external breaches and driving auditable compliance evidence for your company. These top-level objectives have many directives, but they are measurable. Once your security infrastructure is in place, the next step is to test and validate that infrastructure, processes, and people. The best way to test the people and processes is to conduct digital tabletop exercises. They will use real-world attacks, digital-twin simulations, and third-party issue injections to stress test your people, processes, and technology to benchmark cyber readiness and create an improvement program. The exercises may be virtual, the stress-testing will be real, and the benefits will be measurable.
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MATERIALITY – THE MOST CRITICAL DECISION
We live in a world of compliance, regulations, and auditors. The single most significant decision is to understand the materiality of a cyber incident. This will drive the most critical business decisions in disclosure, operations, communications, and determining the real business impact. The choices made about materiality and communications will impact market capitalization, brand equity, and governance oversight. When your team is conducting a tabletop exercise, the triage of materiality is arguably the most important result of the exercise.
The technical response often gets the most attention and is the easiest to remedy. The impact of business materiality is the most critical item for your leadership team.
5 BENEFITS OF DIGITAL TABLETOP EXERCISES
Arbitir’s Virtual Cyber Incident (VCI) exercises use the GIBSEN™ (Graphical Information Base for Security Event Notation) methodology for preparing and representing cyber incidents. The VCI will test your team against the GIBSEN incident workflow, capture your team's actions in a centralized repository, and observe how your team performs as the incident unfolds across multiple teams and technical planes of attack to understand your level of readiness and identify improvement opportunities.
- Multi-Media Triggers - Humans react differently to tests, images, and video. Digital tabletop exercises force your teams to interact and receive information in their most and least preferred ways. This creates a better understanding of how they will work under the stress of everyday operations.
- Digital Playback - Traditional tabletop exercises are a one-and-done event. Digital tabletop exercises can be played back, analyzed, and used to train new team members. They become a corporate asset that pays long-term dividends.
- Real-Time Reactions - Responding to peers, systems, and third parties in real-time creates the stress dynamic required to expose gaps, understand skill gaps, and create the “muscle memory” needed to react effectively during crisis situations.
- The Reality of Distributed Teams - Traditional tabletop exercises are typically conducted when the entire team is in one location and can benefit from face-to-face interactions. Cyber attacks happen at the most inopportune times. People will be on planes, on vacation, unavailable, or working on the other side. We force your team to deal with these realistic scenarios.
- Train as You Work - We use email, Slack, Zoom, phones, text, and dozens of other applications and communication methods. You can not fully understand your cyber readiness if you idealize the circumstance. You must train/practice like you work.
