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.
Nadara Increases Cyber Security Maturity With Bridewell’s 24/7 SOC
Nadara (formerly known as Ventient Energy and Renantis before their merger in 2024) is one of Europe’s largest independent power producers, with 92% of their installed capacity coming from wind, generated by almost 2,000 turbines. Working with nature, backed by shareholders, and with the support of local communities they develop, own and operate renewable energy sites across Europe and the US that power homes, businesses, and change.
In line with their values, their main goals are securing their network, protecting their people, and ensuring the safe and continued generation of energy across Europe. To achieve this, Nadara sought out a security partner to support their current team by providing 24/7 managed security services.
The Challenge
As a leading energy supplier, Nadara recognise the importance of cyber security within their organisation. Before working with Bridewell, they already had a mature security function and had implemented processes to continuously audit and improve their security. However, with the growing risk of ransomware, they wanted to take further steps to mitigate the risk of a cyber security incident.
With these considerations in mind, Nadara sought out a cyber security services company to support their existing security function with 24/7 managed detection and response. By working in collaboration with an experienced team of security professionals who could support and monitor their systems 24/7, Nadara would be able to focus on potential vulnerabilities, raising awareness of cyber security and training their staff to spot the common techniques used by malicious actors.
For Nadara, it was critical that whichever cyber security partner they chose would not just monitor their systems but would be just as invested in cyber security as they are.
"We wanted a security partner, and not just a company who would monitor our systems; we wanted someone who had as much invested in our security as we do." Chris Lawrence Group IT Security Manager
The Solution
In searching for the right security partner, Nadara began looking at different security companies across the market. Above all, they were looking for someone with experience in cyber security who would go above and beyond to help them on their journey to security maturity. Their main evaluation criteria was that their partner would take the security of Nadara as seriously as they do.
During this review process, they discovered Bridewell and thought they would be an ideal partner due to their experience, skills and drive to work with Nadara. In particular, they were impressed with Bridewell’s willingness to act as partners throughout their cyber security journey and not just to ‘act as IT support’.
After discussing Nadara's specific cyber security goals and requirements, Bridewell provided the company with 24/7 Managed Detection and Response. This began with a brief for Nadara's executive board on the wider threat landscape relating to ransomware and an assessment of their detection and reponse weaknesses. These insights were used to deliver an MDR service that reflected the current maturity of their detection and response capabilities.
The service is also supported with ongoing cyber threat intelligence to ensure their posture is continually updated based upon the changing attacker landscape. Bridewell also integrated their existing EDR solutions into the service, so they could maximise their investments Bridewell also provided additional support and advice for a number of Nadara's other security projects. During this process, the Bridewell team worked closely with Nadara to onboard and properly configure many of their security systems into a single central system.
The Results
Since working with Bridewell, Nadara have been able to centralise and unify their security systems to monitor and react to alerts in real time. Working with Bridewell has also allowed Nadara to take a more proactive approach to cyber security where they can respond to threat intelligence and information they receive about their industry.
Since beginning work with Bridewell, Nadara now have increased visibility and the ability to rapidly detect and respond to threats, with a service that continually evolves in line with threat actor behaviour.
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.
