Cyber Incident Exercising
Our cyber incident exercising service helps develop your organisation’s muscle memory in response to potential threats in realistic threat scenarios.
What is a Cyber Incident Exercising?
Cyber incident exercising is the process of practising cyber response techniques against potential threats in a safe and simulated environment.
The purpose of cyber incident exercising is to prepare cyber security teams for real threat scenarios, where response time is critical.
Its tactics and techniques can be used to establish current organisational practices and formulate an incident response plan (IRP) - or to evaluate the effectiveness of an existing IRP.
The Importance of Cyber Incident Exercising
Our cyber incident exercise service is recommended for any organisation looking to upskill and optimise their cyber security team’s ability and preparedness to handle the latest threats.
In the unfortunate event of a breach, well-practised teams can communicate, respond and remediate the threat effectively to minimise the impact. Several key benefits include:
- Cross-team Coordination: Bridewell’s cyber incident exercising service incorporates multiple departments, from IT to legal and communications. During incident response situations, your teams will gain necessary insight into each role and work collaboratively.
- Realistic Scenarios: Roleplaying scenarios suggested by our cyber incident exercising team are based on threats your organisation faces, updated with current industry trends. This is done to provide a realistic environment in which to pressure test your team.
- Identify Gaps in Security: With Bridewell’s cyber incident exercising service, you’ll be able to review team performance in simulations, so you can spot and amend any gaps in team coordination.
What to Expect from Cyber Incident Exercising with Bridewell
Our cyber incident exercising service is designed to prepare your organisation for an effective response against cyber attacks.
It replicates the realistic scenarios your organisation might face. So, key staff know their roles and responsibilities when a live incident occurs. This means less time speculating and more time responding in the face of a real attack.
The key components of our cyber incident exercising service include:
Realistic Simulations
Cyber incident exercising offers tailored simulations that imitate a real cyber attack. This is based on risks, vulnerabilities, and industry threats, to make the simulation highly relevant to a specific organisation. These attacks can range from ransomware to data breaches or insider threats. The aim is to challenge your organisation’s response capabilities and pressure test your team to identify gaps in your remediation process.
Team Involvement
Bridewell’s cyber incident exercising service incorporates members from various departments, including IT, security, communications and legal. This helps ensure that everyone within your organisation is coordinated in its approach to cyber threats.
Cyber Live Play Exercises
Bridewell’s Live Play exercises emulate an adversary incident as a trigger event - adding realism that goes beyond the boardroom table. Technical Live Play is based on your organisation’s threat landscape and uses MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques to develop incident escalation. Executive Live Play focuses on senior decision-making, leadership response and communication in the event of a live attack.
Tactical Guidance
Bridewell’s cyber security experts provide tactical guidance in real-time, offering advice and helping teams understand best practices and improve response strategies.
Debrief and Improvement Plans
Our team of experts will provide a debrief and feedback post-simulation to help break down gaps in team performance and provide actionable plans for improvements going forward.
Learn more about our Incident Response Services
If you require a cyber incident exercising service, speak with one of our team to see how we can support.
Bridewell Enhances Quantios's Security Credentials Through Close Partnership
The Challenge
Serving organisations in the trust, fund and corporate services sectors, Quantios's customers operate in a fast-changing environment in which there is a continually growing focus on security and regulation. Additionally, these organisations’ clients range from high net-worth individuals to corporations and trust funds. As such, the provision of highly personalised and private services means ultra-robust security is a basic expectation for the types of clients they serve.
High customer expectations and increasing regulation have driven consolidation and modernisation of services across the industry which is where Quantios’s integrated software and wealth management solutions come into play. “The industry has been ripe for modernisation and underserved by technology” says Joe Sefton Jenkins, Global Head of Technology & Development at Quantios . Its solutions, such as its NavOne and 5Series trust and fund administration platforms drive efficiency and automation for these organizations.
In order to first engage with and then retain clients, Quantios must be able to demonstrate the most robust levels of security possible within its products. Quantios’s own software and internal practices need to undergo serious scrutiny to ensure the levels of security expected by its clients can be continually met.
The Solution
TrustQuay set out to find a security and risk assurance partner that it could build a long term relationship with, that could provide ongoing support and consultancy around the security of its software and internal practices. The right partner would need to be at the forefront of information security and able to provide expertise and guidance on the latest security issues as they develop.
The Results
As security concern has grown globally in recent times, so did interest in the issue from Quantios’s customer base, particularly in what work was being carried out around product security. Bridewell has worked with Quantios through events and webinars that educate and inform the customer base around the threats that they’re exposed to and what Quantios do to mitigate those threats.
“We now get regular requests from customers asking us to share details of our security practices and results of penetration testing,” says Sefton Jenkins. “Working with Bridewell has helped to instil customers and ourselves with the confidence that we’re building our applications securely.”
The partnership has also helped Quantios to raise internal awareness of security practices. For Sefton Jenkins, this is an absolutely critical benefit. “The depth of expertise from Bridewell has helped my team think about the security risks of the things they’re working on in a much more astute way.”
“Having a partner like Bridewell standing shoulder to shoulder with us not only enhances our credibility but helps our customer base understand the necessary levels of investment to improve their practices through our services.”
Quantios continues to demonstrate its commitment to cyber security and protecting its customers and are also working with Bridewell on implementing an Information Security Management System in preparation for ISO27001 certification.
Quantios chose to partner with Bridewell based on the depth of its expertise and the strength of the work it does with government and large financial institutions. To test the security resilience of Quantios’s products, Bridewell regularly performs penetration testing on the software and reports back the results with insights into where and how any improvements can be made.
Cyber Incident Exercising FAQs
Incident response exercising should be conducted regularly, for example annually or biannually, depending on your risk profile and requirements. It should also be undertaken when significant updates or changes are made to your cyber security infrastructure. This could be through new staff, systems or identified threats.
Tabletop exercising and live play are both cyber incident tactics designed to assess and develop an organisation’s cyber readiness. But they differ in their approach.
A tabletop exercise, as its name suggests, is based in the boardroom. It involves walking teams through potential scenarios and helping them understand their roles and responsibilities as incidents escalate. This can be valuable in building confidence and understanding in a workshop environment.
Live play goes one step further by simulating a real attack to trigger a cyber incident. The main benefit of live play is the ability to pressure-test individuals in a realistic attack scenario.
Live play and red teaming are both cyber security tactics used to test a team’s ability to effectively respond to threats.
Red teaming aims to test an organisation’s ability to detect and manage attacks by simulating an attempt to hack or compromise the IT environment. It aims to evaluate threat prevention and spot gaps in defences.
Live play is instead focused on testing the organisation’s response once an incident has already occurred. It focuses on response effectiveness – how teams communicate and ultimately remediate a live, escalating incident.
Why Us?
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Awards
Our team have won numerous industry awards, including 'Cyber Security Company of the Year' at the Cyber Security Awards 2026 and Best Cyber Security Service Provider' at the Cyber Security Awards 2025.
Certifications
Our people and services are highly accredited by leading industry bodies including CREST, the NCSC, and more. Our SOC holds extensive accreditations from CREST (including for CSIR and SOC2) and works closely with our cyber consultancy services.
Partnerships
As a Microsoft Partner, we also hold advanced specialisms in Cloud Security and Threat Protection. We’ve also implemented some of the UK’s largest deployments of the Microsoft Security stack, inc. Sentinel, Defender, Purview and more.
