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Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercises

Realistic, scenario-based incident response simulations that test your team's readiness before a real crisis forces the issue.

A tabletop exercise is a facilitated discussion-based simulation where your leadership team, IT staff, and key stakeholders walk through a realistic cybersecurity incident scenario step by step. There's no live systems testing, it's a structured conversation designed to expose gaps in your incident response plan, communication chains, and decision-making processes.

Most organizations discover during a tabletop that their incident response plan either doesn't exist, hasn't been updated in years, or falls apart the moment someone asks "who calls the insurance carrier?" CyberCascadia runs these exercises so you find the gaps now, not during an actual breach.

How It Works

  1. Pre-Exercise Planning, We work with you to select a scenario relevant to your industry and threat profile. We review your existing incident response plan (if one exists) and tailor the exercise to your organization's size, structure, and technology environment.
  2. Facilitated Exercise, A 2-3 hour session where we walk your team through the scenario in stages. At each stage, we introduce new information and ask your team to make decisions: Who do you call? What do you shut down? Who talks to the press? Who notifies customers?
  3. After-Action Report, Within one week, you receive a written report documenting what went well, what broke down, and specific recommendations for improvement, prioritized by risk impact.

Scenario Library

We maintain a library of realistic scenarios based on actual incidents affecting Pacific Northwest businesses. Exercises are customized to your organization but typically draw from these categories:

Ransomware Attack

Your file server is encrypted. Backups may be compromised. The attacker is demanding payment. Operations are halted. What does your team do in the first 60 minutes?

Data Breach / Exfiltration

Customer PII or CUI has been exfiltrated. You don't know how much or for how long. Legal, regulatory, and customer notification obligations kick in. Who owns what?

Insider Threat

A departing employee has been downloading sensitive files for weeks. HR, legal, IT, and management all need to coordinate, simultaneously. How does your organization respond?

Business Email Compromise

Your CFO's email has been spoofed, or compromised. A fraudulent wire transfer has been initiated. The vendor on the other end is calling to confirm. Time is critical.

Business Continuity

Your primary data center is offline, natural disaster, provider outage, or attack. How long until your business can operate? Who has the authority to invoke the BC plan?

Third-Party / Supply Chain

A critical vendor has been breached and your data is in the blast radius. You're getting calls from your customers asking if they're affected. What's your response plan?

Who Should Participate

Tabletop exercises are most effective when they include the people who would actually be making decisions during an incident. That typically means:

  • CEO / Owner / Executive leadership
  • IT Director or MSP point of contact
  • Finance / CFO (insurance, wire fraud, financial impact)
  • HR (insider threat, employee communications)
  • Legal counsel (if available)
  • Operations leads (business continuity decisions)

We recommend 6-12 participants for the most productive exercise. Larger groups can be accommodated.

What You Get

  • Custom scenario tailored to your industry and threat profile
  • 2-3 hour facilitated exercise (onsite or virtual)
  • Written after-action report with findings and recommendations
  • Incident response plan gap analysis
  • Prioritized remediation roadmap

Why CyberCascadia

Most tabletop exercises run by MSPs are generic, the same ransomware scenario for every client, delivered by someone who's never managed a real incident. CyberCascadia's exercises are built from real-world threat intelligence and facilitated by a CISSP with enterprise security experience. We know what actually happens during a breach because we've been on the other side of the table.

And because we're advisory-only, we have no incentive to use the exercise as a sales pitch for monitoring tools or managed services. The findings are objective. The recommendations are honest.

Schedule a Tabletop Exercise →

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No pitch, no proposal, no commitment. A 30-minute discovery call is just a conversation.

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