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 was engaged to conduct a comprehensive Cyber Resilience Audit (CRA) against the organisation’s Cyber Assessment Framework (CAF) self assessment to ensure that it was accurate and supported with sufficient evidence to meet regulatory expectations.
The Challenge
The organisation operates a diverse and safety-critical technology landscape spanning enterprise systems and industrial control environments. Key challenges included complex interdependencies across IT and OT, multiple critical operational sites, and increasing regulatory scrutiny. The organisation needed to demonstrate that CAF outcomes were supported by both documented evidence and operational practice, delivered through a consistent multi-phase audit approach.
The Solution
Bridewell applied a structured, risk-based CRA methodology, aligned to CAF requirements and tailored to the organisation’s operational context using a phased approach.
Phased CRA Delivery
The audit was delivered across two phases: Phase 1 focused on Objectives A, C and D around; governance, risk management, security policies, awareness, detection and response. Phase 2 focused on technical application of controls aligned to objective B of the CAF, including; identity and access control, data security, system security and network resilience.
On-Site Assurance
During both phases, Bridewell conducted on-site visits to critical operational locations to validate physical and environmental security, review OT environments, and confirm alignment between cyber security and safety-critical processes. This ensured controls were implemented consistently in practice.
Evidence Validation
Bridewell performed detailed validation of CAF self-assessments through evidence sampling, stakeholder interviews and alignment to Indicators of Good Practice (IGPs). Where gaps or inconsistencies were identified, further clarification was obtained to ensure findings were robust and defensible.
Reporting
A structured variance analysis process was applied to identify differences between the organisation’s self-assessment and Bridewell’s independent review. Bridewell produced a comprehensive CRA report detailing these variances, alongside targeted remediation recommendations and areas of good practice, ensuring a clear, defensible, and regulator-ready cyber resilience posture.
The Results
Bridewell's structured CRA methodology enabled the organisation to obtain an independent and evidence-based view of its cyber resilience posture across both IT and OT environments. By combining experienced CAF assessors, a phased audit approach and on-site assurance activities, Bridewell delivered a streamlined and efficient assessment while minimising operational disruption.
The collaborative approach enabled an efficient audit delivery and reinforced confidence in the organisation’s ability to progress its cyber resilience programme. Clear and defensible reporting aligned to the CAF provided stakeholders with a comprehensive understanding of cyber resilience strengths, areas requiring improvement and overall organisational posture. This provided a reliable basis for governance discussions and informed decision-making by senior leadership and board-level stakeholders
To summarise:
- Independent verification of CAF self-assessment outcomes.
- A consistent and repeatable assessment methodology across IT and OT environments.
- Experienced assessors with strong understanding of Critical National Infrastructure and regulatory expectations.
- Clear, evidence-based reporting suitable for operational stakeholders, executive leadership and board-level audiences.
- Identification of gaps between documented processes and operational implementation through stakeholder engagement and on-site assurance activities.
- Actionable insights to support ongoing cyber resilience improvement and regulatory readiness.
The audit provided the organisation with an independent assessment of cyber resilience across its critical IT and OT environments, supported by detailed evidence validation and on-site assurance activities. The final CRA report delivered a clear and regulator-ready view of cyber resilience posture, identifying strengths, improvement opportunities and examples of good practice. Through Bridewell's structured assessment methodology, the organisation gained increased confidence in its CAF self-assessment and a stronger foundation to support ongoing cyber resilience improvement activities.
Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) operator responsible for the distribution of gas across the UK.
Industry
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.
