Guides
How to run a cybersecurity tabletop exercise properly
Everything we have learned building and facilitating cyber tabletop exercises: scenario selection, inject design, facilitation under pressure, and reports executives act on.
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The three pillars
If you read nothing else, read these.
How to run a cybersecurity tabletop exercise
The full step-by-step walkthrough: scoping, the room, injects, facilitation, hot wash and report.
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Cybersecurity tabletop exercises: the complete guide
What they are, why they work, formats, frequency, frameworks, and the full running order.
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Tabletop simulator for cybersecurity
What a cyber tabletop simulator actually does, how it differs from board-game software, and what to look for.
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Library
Every guide
9 min read
How to Run a Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercise
A tabletop exercise fails for boring reasons: the scope was vague, the wrong people were in the room, and the facilitator read slides instead of apply…
8 min read
Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercise Scenarios That Hold Up Under Pressure
The scenario is not the exercise. What matters is which decision it forces and how quickly the room runs out of comfortable options. These are the sce…
10 min read
Ransomware Tabletop Exercise: Full Scenario Walkthrough
This is a runnable 90-minute ransomware exercise. It assumes an executive room of six to ten people plus observers, and it is built around one questio…
7 min read
Incident Response Tabletop Exercises: What They Are and Why They Work
An incident response tabletop exercise is a discussion-based rehearsal in which a team works through a realistic incident under time pressure, making …
6 min read
Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercise Template
Copy this structure for any cybersecurity tabletop exercise. It is deliberately short — a template that takes an hour to fill in gets used; a 40-page …
6 min read
Writing a Tabletop Exercise After-Action Report
The after-action report is the only part of the exercise that survives the week. Most are written like meeting minutes and read like them. This is how…
5 min read
Tabletop Exercise vs Simulation: Which One Do You Need?
These terms get used interchangeably in procurement documents and they are not the same thing. Choosing wrong wastes either budget or executive goodwi…
6 min read
Facilitating a Tabletop Exercise: Technique, Pressure and Silence
Content is maybe a third of a good exercise. The rest is facilitation — knowing when to push, when to let a silence run, and how to stop the most seni…
Stop building exercises from scratch
TableTop Sim ships the scenarios, the injects, the control room and the report.