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.
Hyundai Capital UK Enhances AI Governance Through Alignment with ISO 42001
The Challenge
While HCUK already had a mature, well-functioning Information Security Management System (ISMS) certified to ISO 27001:2022, evolving AI risks and emerging expectations around ethics, transparency and accountability highlighted the need to expand the ISMS into an Integrated/Business Management System (I/BMS) incorporating the requirements of ISO 42001:2023.
The new ISO 42001 standard emphasises the need for responsible AI governance, lifecycle oversight and organisational readiness. These are areas that required additional enhancements within HCUK’s existing system. As AI technologies such as Microsoft Copilot became more prominent, HCUK recognised the importance of adopting a proactive approach to governance, ensuring that appropriate policies, risk methodologies, training programmes and oversight mechanisms were established before AI usage scaled further within the organisation.
HCUK wanted to implement requirements aligned to ISO 42001, rather than fully certify, due to current organisational need, and Bridewell worked with HCUK to implement key requirements by taking a risk-based approach to control selection.
Bridewell has a longstanding and trusted relationship with HCUK, having delivered numerous ISO 27001 internal audits, supported security enhancement activities and contributed to the development of security processes and ISMS documentation. As a result, Bridewell has deep familiarity with HCUK’s operating environment, risk profile and organisational culture that proved helpful in aligning with ISO 42001.
In addition, Bridewell demonstrated proven expertise in responsible AI governance, ISO 42001 implementation and the design of integrated management systems. This combination of technical capability, sector‑specific understanding and pre‑existing stakeholder rapport positioned Bridewell as the leading partner to guide HCUK through the initial stages of aligning its governance framework with the new ISO 42001 requirements.
The Solution
In delivering this engagement, Bridewell provided an ISO 42001‑experienced consultant to lead the development and integration of key controls from an Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS).
The work began with an updating and maturing a number of key policies that overlap between the ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 including:
- The scope of the management system to ensure that it formally encompassed AI‑related considerations and accounted for new roles, responsibilities and oversight obligations introduced through the standard.
- Identifying internal and external issues, defining interested‑party requirements and establishing AI‑specific objectives and KPIs.
- The AI Security Policy was reviewed and refined to ensure clarity of leadership responsibilities and to embed principles of responsible and transparent AI usage.
- New artefacts were developed to strengthen the organisation’s governance structure, including an AI Acceptable Use Policy.
- Bridewell also supported HCUK in the refinement of its risk management processes by updating the existing risk methodology to incorporate considerations unique to AI, such as fairness, interpretability, ethical risk, safety measures and potential societal impacts.
- Importantly, as a new requirement with ISO 42001, Bridewell worked closely with HCUK to create an AI Impact Assessment Framework for the organisation’s initial AI use case, ensuring that risk‑informed decision‑making frameworks were in place from the outset.
To support operationalisation of key controls, a programme of training and awareness was developed. This included training materials for HCUK’s general staff members, along with a tailored session for senior leadership. The training initiatives were designed to ensure that employees at all levels understood their responsibilities, the organisation’s ethical principles and the mechanisms for reporting concerns or uncertainties surrounding AI usage.
The Results
The collaboration delivered significant benefits to HCUK. By embedding AI considerations into existing governance structures and a certified ISO 27001 ISMS, the organisation can achieve a more robust and transparent approach to AI usage that anticipates rather than reacts to business change and as AI adoption increases.
The early integration of AIMS components within the broader ISMS reduces the likelihood of future compliance challenges and positioned the organisation to manage AI‑related risks with confidence, helping to reduce and mitigate AI risks quickly. Additionally, the effort needed to implement key requirements from ISO 42001 into a certified ISMS was significantly reduced to due to the integration and streamlining of processes and controls to meet the ISO 42001 standard requirements.
Using the ISO 42001 training material will help staff across the organisation develop a stronger understanding of responsible AI principles, enabling safer and more consistent use of AI. Updated policies, clearly defined roles and well‑structured processes increase the organisation’s readiness for audits.
Moreover, HCUK is now able to demonstrate enhanced accountability, ethical alignment and preparedness which helps to reinforce trust among customers, partners and internal stakeholders. Ultimately this helps to ensure HCUK remains future‑proofed in an environment of rapidly accelerating technological and risk landscape change.
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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.
