Your firewall logs show it, your managed service provider’s alert shows it, and an accounts assistant has mentioned that her password stopped working. Each piece is noticed by someone different, and none of them talks to the others for six hours. Breaches often succeed not because nobody saw the signs, but because nobody joined them up in time.
Testing the response, not just the defences
A war gaming exercise simulates a realistic cyber attack unfolding over time and puts the people who would respond to it through their paces: in-house IT, security teams, outsourced providers and the managers they escalate to. The question is simple: would you spot it, contain it and recover?
How it differs from a boardroom exercise
Our crisis desktop scenarios focus on leadership decisions. War gaming goes deeper into the technical response: who sees which alert, how evidence is preserved, how systems are isolated, how backups are restored, and how quickly information reaches decision-makers. Many organisations run both, one after the other.
What you learn
Gaps between teams and suppliers. Alerts that nobody owns. Contracts that do not say what your provider will do in a crisis. Backups that take far longer to restore than anyone assumed. Each finding comes with a practical recommendation.
When the simulation becomes real, our incident response team is ready. Leaders can prepare through ransomware response training. Design an exercise with us.
