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.
Northern Gas Networks Drives Detection and Response with Bridewell
The Challenge
To increase the cyber maturity that supports large-scale transformation projects, NGN understood the importance of working to improve its detection and response capabilities. Digital connectivity plays a major role in the future of NGN’s operational technologies within their pipeline network, and they recognised the importance of securing it appropriately by working with a suitable cyber security partner.
Before working with Bridewell, NGN already had solutions in-house to aggregate security data, but this wasn’t being effectively utilised or continuously developed and didn’t have the necessary capabilities to monitor their entire converging IT/ OT estate. In parallel to this, NGN had developed their technology strategy and was in the process of moving elements of its enterprise IT to a Microsoft-based technology platform. Whilst they were already making some use of their E5 licenses, they needed a partner who could help them fully realise the commercial and technological benefits of their licensing and how this could be aligned with their overall business and cyber security strategy.
To truly modernise its cyber security strategy, NGN was also aware of the value of a threat-intelligence-led approach that would incorporate Bridewell’s intelligence and insights into relevant threat actors to drive detection and response. For NGN, this created a specific set of requirements. They needed a threat intelligence-led partner who could continually mature their detection and response capabilities, had significant experience within the utilities sector and operational technology and had a strong understanding of Microsoft solutions and regulatory requirements set out in the NIS Regulations.
The Solution
To find the right partner, NGN issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) seeking proposals from leading cyber security service providers. Of the seven suppliers who responded, NGN chose Bridewell as they were impressed with their Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service. Underpinned by a modern approach to threat hunting and threat intelligence, Bridewell’s service aligned with NGN’s requirements by focusing on remediating threats rather than just identifying them.
Bridewell’s experience in protecting OT environments, within the utilities sector and beyond, and status as a CREST accredited NCSC Assured Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner with advanced specialisations and member of MISA (Microsoft Intelligent Security Association) also aligned with their selection criteria.
Working alongside a number of NGN’s in-house teams - ranging from IT, infrastructure and OT engineering – Bridewell delivered their MDR service. The service was built upon Extended Detection and Response (XDR) technology and incorporated Bridewell’s threat intelligence capabilities throughout. One of the service’s key features was vulnerability management. Bridewell implemented a risk-based model that helps NGN drive improvements in how they respond to vulnerabilities.
"We were very pleased that Bridewell brought the project in on time and within budget."The Results
After signature, but ahead of the contract start date, Bridewell’s cyber threat intelligence team identified the potential for war in Ukraine to increase risk for natural gas providers. Accordingly, Bridewell offered to start the service early, before the contractually agreed start date, to ensure that NGN was protected in the shortest time possible. Within 24 hours, Bridewell deployed the Microsoft Sentinel SIEM, connecting available data sources and turned on their security monitoring service that encompassed their entire IT estate.
These capabilities were advanced throughout the rest of the project as NGN’s wider IT technology, security vendors and operational technology were incorporated into the service. Having completed the onboarding process, NGN now have extensive detection and response capabilities that give them a complete view of their organisation as well as the ability to remediate any threats or vulnerabilities that may arise.
Beyond maturing their cyber security posture, Bridewell’s MDR service has supported their business objectives to date and has played a role in enabling future transformation projects. Delivering a secure, safe and reliable network that is monitored 24x7, which benefits both NGN and it’s customers, is a key deliverable to support it’s transition to whatever the future holds for the energy sector.
"Bridewell's technical subject matter experts are some of the best we've ever worked with. We've recommended them to other utilities providers in the UK and Group Companies."In the future, NGN will continue working with Bridewell to widen their technology visibility even further and complement security architecture in support of upcoming technical projects.
Learn more about our Managed Detection and Response Service.
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?
.svg?sfvrsn=428a1942_1){kind=icon}
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.
