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 Provides Expertise to Achieve IS027001 Accreditation
Bridewell worked with Attraqt on a five-day consultancy engagement. This gave Attraqt a full gap analysis of where the business needed to focus and a definitive project proposal from Bridewell detailing the costs and resources needed to complete the ISO27001 certification.
Attraqt provides leading retailers with the ability to power exceptional shopping experiences. Their technology, driven by AI, helps retailers to improve the customer searching experience by matching products with consumer interests in a fresh and engaging way.
The Challenge
As a market leader in its field, Attraqt understood the need to demonstrate, to its customers, that it had the necessary security standards in place under the ISO27001 framework. In addition, the business was keen to test its current security policies by using vulnerability scanning and penetration testing services.
“We deal with many prominent retail customers who increasingly expect ISO27001 accreditation as standard when they send out their RFP documentation. We already had information security practices in place, but these were not defined policies — as an industry leader we should have these,” said Hiten Kacha, IT Manager of Attraqt.
“We also found that customers were starting to ask about our cyber security practices. Using Bridewell’s expertise in cyber security services, as well as information security, we were able to test our own security posture and evidence this to our customers.”
Attraqt considered a number of options, from general consultancy to fully outsourcing the project. Although the business had the in-house skills, Attraqt wanted to complete the ISO27001 accreditation process quickly and with minimal impact on the day to day running of the business.
The Solution
Attraqt met with a number of information security consultancy providers at Infosec 2018. Following this, they had a number of scoping meetings with Bridewell to understand the project parameters and financial costs.
As a result of these meetings, the Bridewell team worked with Attraqt on a five-day consultancy engagement. This gave Attraqt a full gap analysis of where the business needed to focus and a definitive project proposal from Bridewell detailing the costs and resources needed to complete the ISO27001 certification.
“We were very impressed with how Bridewell took the time to understand our business. They gave us a defined plan which outlined the processes and methods needed to achieve our certification,” said Kacha.
“It was important for us to choose a partner that we could trust and work with as an extension of our own business. Bridewell fitted the bill,” he added.
The Results
The full engagement started in February 2019 and Attraqt achieved its full ISO27001 certification in September 2019. One key aspect of the certification was directly linked to the outcomes of penetration testing and vulnerability scanning. Having Bridewell perform all these services kept everything ‘under one roof’, ensured that the project came in on schedule and on budget.
“The project has been very successful, but we recognise that getting the certification is only the first step. Bridewell has been a valuable addition to our team over the last six months. We look forward to using their expertise in the future, particularly around security scanning and penetration testing, to help us maintain and develop our security framework, “ concluded Kacha.
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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.
