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.
Our client is a leading business in the UK water sector and a FTSE 250 company, providing clean water and wastewater services to over 3 million people and 300,000 businesses.
In 2021, they were looking to increase the maturity of data protection across their organisation, as well as expand their Data Privacy team. While their Data Privacy team had identified several areas that could be improved, they lacked the resource to make these changes without first being able to demonstrate the value to the wider business.
The Challenge
In 2021, before working with Bridewell, our client had a relatively small data privacy team. While there was no question of their compliance, there were areas where they'd identified scope for improvement within data protection. At the time, Data Subject Access Rights Request (DSARs) were spread out across the business and not being handled consistently, their DSaaS wasn’t centralised, and their Records of Processing Activities (ROPA) needed an update.
However, since they didn’t have the resources to implement improvements, they first needed to expand the team. This required educating the wider business about data privacy in order to secure the resources needed for a larger data privacy function. Having worked with Bridewell previously, our client chose to work with us to support in assessing their maturity, recommending improvements, and engaging the wider business.
The Solution
To help our client enhance data protection across their organisation, we first delivered a data privacy maturity assessment in 2021. Our report made detailed recommendations on areas in which our client could improve, providing their data privacy team with clear evidence and rationale for the need for greater resources.
The data privacy team found that the report was a valuable asset as it helped them secure buy-in from the wider business, enabling them to access the resources needed to enhance their data privacy programme. Based on the report findings, our client subsequently brought us on to help update their ROPA and put processes in place to ensure it was updated more regularly. We also performed a data mapping exercise in 2022 for both our client and one of their subsidiary businesses that provides billing and customer services.
Through the exercise, their ROPA was refreshed and automated via workflows in OneTrust. This required deep dive workshops with each business area to understand our client's personal data processing activities. We then provided technical support with importing the outputs of the sessions into OneTrust, which provided our client with the platform to streamline it’s approach to maintaining its accountability documentation through automation.
Through the engagements, we had regular communications with our clients key stakeholders, providing them with clarity on how the project would progress, what we'd deliver, and what was needed from their side. Later in 2022, we also worked with our client to implement an internal audit approach aligned to ISO 27701 for second line assurance, enabling them to oversee their risk management and compliance functions and audit high risk areas of the business.
The Results
Today, our client has a mature data privacy function with a much expanded team of data privacy professionals. With this additional resource, the team are able to undertake a number of workstreams for data protection so that maturity is constantly improving.
Our client is a leading business in the UK water sector and a FTSE 250 company, providing clean water and wastewater to over 3 million people and 300,000 businesses.
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.
