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 helps deliver competitive advantage to support Opticore’s growth
Opticore is an IT Consultancy founded in 2013 to bridge a gap in the market between the major IT services providers and the consultancy market. The London-based organisation employs around 75 permanent network engineers, across various disciplines, investing heavily in their training and development. Offering vendor-neutral services including design, implementation and audit work, Opticore’s portfolio and experience includes clients in the banking, media, insurance, healthcare and telecommunications sectors.
The Challenge
Driven by client requests and questions around its security profile, Opticore wanted to gain a competitive advantage by demonstrating it has the right compliance and cyber security practices in place. The company embarked on achieving internationally recognised ISO certification for information security (ISO 27001) in October 2019.
“Over the past three years we have grown rapidly as a business. We wanted to put the structures in place to enable us to get to the next level of growth. As an organisation that prides itself on our quality of service, ISO certification provides a stamp of excellence which opens doors to new clients,“ explained Mike Hord, Opticore Commercial Director.
“Our mission is connecting people and moving data across global corporate networks, so we need to ensure that we walk the walk and everything we do is done securely.”
However, in preparation of the ISO audit and accreditation process, the company identified a lack of in-house resource to dedicate to the task. Bridewell was brought in to assist with the certification and implementation of the frameworks which involves setting objectives and establishes principles for action with regard to information security.
The Solution
Bridewell was brought in as a specialist cyber security and data privacy consultancy that delivers a range of solutions, including support, management and audit services around achieving ISO accreditation.
The Bridewell team worked with Opticore to understand its requirements, what processes were already in place, and exactly what needed to be implemented from a framework point of view.
It used a tried and tested five-phase methodology which started with scope design and planning, moved on to risk assessment and remediation, and then implemented ISMS controls and risk mitigation. The project was rounded off with an evaluation and preparation stage, before certification was awarded in the final phase.
Bridewell was highly flexible in the delivery approach, accommodating Opticore’s changing requirements and timescales.
In an unprecedented move for the industry certification bodies, the start of the pandemic forced the stage one and stage two audits to be conducted online. Bridewell’s flexibility meant that Opticore was even able to accelerate the process at the start of the lockdown as it had more time to devote to the project, which was ultimately completed to schedule in September 2020.
The Results
Opticore is now competing at a level above or alongside its competitors when it comes to demonstrating its security credentials, fortifying its position at the forefront of the industry.
It is now looking to constantly improve its security measures and continues to engage Bridewell as a partner in order to regularly assess its security capability, with the next goal being to achieve Cyber Essentials certification. The process has been a trigger for the organisation to formalise and document all of its backend processes.
“We wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Bridewell’s services. The whole project went very smoothly, and we came through the certification with flying colours. Our relationship with Bridewell has been tremendous and it really feels like part of our team now. They guided us gently through the process and always kept us on track.
“Having a sounding board with its security expertise is invaluable, and I can’t speak of Bridewell highly enough,” concluded Hord.
With Opticore’s accreditation, Bridewell upholds its 100% ISO 27001 success rate.
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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.
