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Tabletop Exercise (TTX) Overview

A Cyber Security Tabletop Exercise (TTX) is a structured activity that evaluates an organization’s ability to respond to a cyber attack. It is designed to test the effectiveness of Incident Response (IR) plans and assess the awareness and preparedness of organizational stakeholders regarding their roles and responsibilities during a cyber incident. A TTX involves a verbally-simulated scenario that mimics a real cybersecurity incident, potentially impacting business continuity.

How is a TTX Conducted?

Experienced cyber experts lead the TTX, creating realistic cyber-attack scenarios tailored to your organization. During the exercise, participants must think critically and make decisions as they would during an actual incident. Typical participants include members of executive management, IT and OT teams, and those identified in your IR plan.

Key Benefits of Conducting a TTX

Evaluate Incident Response Plans: Test and identify strengths and weaknesses in your current IR plans.
Improve Stakeholder Awareness: Ensure all relevant stakeholders understand their roles and responsibilities during a cyber incident.
Enhance Decision-Making Skills: Simulate real-world pressure to improve decision-making and response times.
Strengthen Coordination: Foster better communication and coordination among different teams and departments.
Identify Gaps and Areas for Improvement: Highlight any deficiencies in the response strategy and provide insights for enhancements.

Key Participants in a TTX

Executive Management: Provides strategic oversight and decision-making during the incident.
IT and OT Teams: Responsible for technical response and recovery efforts.
IR Plan Identified Personnel: Includes all individuals identified within the IR plan, ensuring a comprehensive response.

By conducting a TTX, organizations can significantly improve their cyber readiness, ensuring they are better prepared to handle real-world cyber incidents effectively.

Why Conduct an OT Tabletop Exercise?

Organizations serious about maintaining OT business continuity and mitigating the impact of cyber-attacks must prepare for all eventualities. Regularly conducting OT Tabletop Exercises (TTX) is an effective way to ensure overall preparedness. Furthermore, regulators globally are enforcing stricter compliance standards, mandating that organizations, especially those in critical national infrastructure, regularly test their Incident Response (IR) plans through TTX. Beyond regulatory requirements, regularly testing IR plans offers several advantages:

Awareness and Realization: A well-conducted OT TTX can be an eye-opener for key stakeholders and participants. Many business executives and individuals in critical positions might not have considered certain scenarios or their potential impacts until they are exposed to them during a TTX workshop.
Enhanced Decision-Making: By simulating real crisis situations, participants experience intense pressure, leading to faster decision-making during actual incidents. Practicing worst-case scenarios ensures that when an attack occurs, there is no room for disagreements or disputes on the next steps, as they have already been rehearsed.
Identifying Training Needs: TTX workshops can reveal whether specific staff members need re-training for cyber crisis management or their IR responsibilities in the event of an attack.
Improved Coordination and Communication: TTX facilitates better inter-departmental coordination and communication, involving all key stakeholders in crisis management. This leads to positive long-term implications for teamwork and cross-departmental collaboration.
Cost-Effective Security Enhancement: TTX is a cost-effective method to strengthen an organization’s security defenses without disrupting business IT and OT systems.
Comprehensive Reporting: A formal report generated at the end of a TTX workshop lists the strengths and weaknesses of the IR processes, the group’s collective response capability, and more. This report becomes a solid blueprint for building both tactical and strategic capabilities.

Key Benefits of Conducting an OT Tabletop Exercise

Validate IR Plans: Demonstrates whether your incident response plans are effective.
Clarify Roles and Responsibilities: Ensures all stakeholders, including third parties, understand their roles.
Facilitate Business Buy-In: Helps security teams secure buy-in from the business for future cybersecurity decisions and budgets.
Highlight Improvement Areas: Identifies areas that need improvement and staff who may need additional training.
Enhance Coordination: Promotes better inter-departmental coordination and communication.
Cost-Effective Resilience: Provides a cost-effective way to improve OT cyber resilience in the long term (strategic remediations).
Blueprint for Enhancement: Offers a blueprint for enhancing cyber defenses in the short term (tactical remediations).

Deliverables from our OT Tabletop Exercise Service

As part of this service offering, CNB delivers a facilitated TTX workshop and a formalized report that includes:

TTX Methodology: Detailed explanation of the approach used.
Executive Summary: High-level overview of findings and recommendations.
Current Situation: Description of the current risk exposure and potential consequences.
Real-World Scenarios: Description of the cyber scenarios considered and used during the TTX.
Findings and Observations: Detailed account of the workshop outcomes.
Remediation Recommendations: Prioritized suggestions for improvements.

Additionally, the following items are provided:

High-Level Presentation: A presentation tailored for executive-level stakeholders to convey the findings and recommendations effectively.

Conducting regular OT Tabletop Exercises helps organizations build a robust, resilient cybersecurity posture, ensuring they are well-prepared to handle real-world cyber incidents effectively.

What is the Benefit of a Cyber Table Top Exercise?

Table top exercises help organisations outline the steps they might take during a cyber attack. By discussing the scenario in advance, CISOs and other risk experts can identify flaws or gaps in the organisation’s response and make adjustments.

In summary:

Demonstrating whether your Incident Response Plans are any good or not.
Clarifying individual roles and responsibilities to the Board and the Executive.
Making it easier for the IT/OT Security teams to get business buy-ins on future cybersecurity decisions and budgets.
Highlighting areas that may need work and staff members who may need more training in incident response.
Facilitating improved inter-departmental coordination and communication.
A cost-effective means to improve cyber resilience over the long term.
A blueprint (the executive summary) for enhancing cyber defences over the next few months.

How Often Should Table Top Exercises be Performed?

To stay abreast of the current threat landscape and to best prepare and arm your team, performing a TTX at least once a year will ensure that existing staff awareness is always refreshed and that new staff receives comprehensive training on your IR processes.

How Long Do Table Top Exercises Take to Run?

Most TTX’s are led by a facilitator who guides the conversation and captures lessons learned. Depending on the tabletop exercise’s objectives and scope, they may require a few hours or multiple days.

What is the Typical Format of Table Top Exercise?

The typical format for table top exercises involves:

Testing preplanned actions in response to scenarios;
Group discussions to review the effectiveness of strategies and tactics, led by a skilled facilitator;
Introduction of additional challenges to the presented scenarios to widen the scope of cybersecurity problem-solving.

What is an "Inject" in a Table Top Exercise?

Injects are used to drive the simulation and exercise. They are instigated by the facilitator and not normally known to the group taking part. In an OT context an inject may see a supporting OT system compromised or another unexpected event take part during the incident. The aim is to test how the group dynamically work together to resolve the injected event.

What Do I Need to Consider for a Table Top Exercise?

The first thing you should consider is whether a table top exercise is acceptable for your business. It’s only worthwhile to begin the process if you already have an Incident Response plan in place. Table top exercises are helpful for testing strategies, but they don’t tell you anything if everyone engaged is just improvising. You’ll also need institutional buy-in for the process: there’s no use in doing the exercise if management refuses to allow you to adjust plans and policies based on the outcomes.

Tabletop Exercise (TTX) Overview

TABLE TOP EXERCISE (TTX)

How is a TTX Conducted?

Key Benefits of Conducting a TTX

Key Participants in a TTX

Why Conduct an OT Tabletop Exercise?

Key Benefits of Conducting an OT Tabletop Exercise

Deliverables from our OT Tabletop Exercise Service

What is the Benefit of a Cyber Table Top Exercise?

How Often Should Table Top Exercises be Performed?

How Long Do Table Top Exercises Take to Run?

What is the Typical Format of Table Top Exercise?

What is an "Inject" in a Table Top Exercise?

What Do I Need to Consider for a Table Top Exercise?

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