Why is it called a tabletop exercise?

This is because tabletop exercises are discussion-based activities that usually happen around a table.

How long is a tabletop exercise?

Tabletop exercises can last anywhere between 1 and 4 hours based on the type and complexity of the scenario.

Who should participate in a tabletop exercise?

A TTX exercise can involve people from various departments of an organisation - legal. IT, PR, security, and more.

Measuring Success: How to Gauge the Effectiveness of Your Tabletop Exercise

Cybersecurity tabletop exercises (TTX) are activities where participants are given simulated real-world scenarios to handle in order to test their preparedness against a real security incident.

Tabletop exercises help you find gaps in your security strategies and improve them, facilitate better communications, and train employees.

But how do you know if your exercises are effective or successful?

In this article, we’ll understand the effectiveness of your tabletop exercises and some best practices.

Why Should You Measure Tabletop Exercise Effectiveness?

The answer is similar to diagnosing an issue without assessing the symptoms.

If you run a cybersecurity tabletop exercise with no idea of how it’s impacting your business, you’ll never be able to figure out the underlying issues and improve the outcomes.

Measuring the effectiveness of your cybersecurity tabletop exercises offers insights to help you understand whether your efforts are actually paying off. It tells if the exercises were successful not only in terms of smooth execution but also in:

Detecting vulnerabilities and issues in your cybersecurity strategies
Enhancing cyber incident response planning
Finding the team's readiness to face attacks and neutralise them efficiently
Mitigating security vulnerabilities, risks, and attacks by using the insights gained
Improving your overall security strategies
Tracking growth over time in terms of preparedness and respons

Key Metrics to Measure

Calculating the below key metrics will provide you the insights into how effective your tabletop exercises are:

Incident Response Time

Incident response time tells how quickly your team can respond to an attack. The incident response metric is calculated in units of time, such as minutes, hours, or days.

According to a report, organizations that contain a security breach within 30 days save over $1 million compared to those taking longer. This is why finding and neutralizing incidents as quickly as you can is crucial.

To measure the incident response time, find out how much time the participants of a tabletop exercise took to:

Identify a given security incident
Evaluate its impact on your business and operations
Report the incident to higher management
Contain and remediate the incident

Incident response time differs from one scenario to another. So, if you compare the response times of two distinct groups, ensure to give them the same/similar scenario, else it could affect the outcomes.

Decision-Making

Cybersecurity incidents require you to make effective decisions quickly to secure your infrastructure and data when you still have time.
However, not everyone can work efficiently under this immense pressure when the entire organisation’s security is at stake.

When you conduct tabletop exercises in cybersecurity, measure how well the participants performed and the quality of the decisions they made under pressure. Here’s how to measure the decision-making quality:

Assess how fast they made their decisions utilising available information
Do the decisions align with your organisation’s incident response plan?
Were the decisions right - practically and ethically?
Were they able to resolve the incident or exacerbate it further?
What were the impacts of their decisions on your business, employees, and customers?

The answers to these questions will help you understand issues in your exercises and improve them to better the outcomes.

Scenario Complexity and Practicality

Tabletop exercise effectiveness also depends on how practical and complex your scenarios are, influencing the success rates.

Complexity: Too complex tabletop exercise scenarios can leave teams in dilemma and take longer to resolve. But this doesn’t mean you go too gentle on them. Mix and match to find the right complexity for scenarios. Alternatively, you may start with an easy exercise and then move ahead with intermediate to highly complex to gauge performance at each level.

To measure complexity, evaluate if there are any unexpected developments or decisions by the participants. Calculate the number of decisions they made - were they confident, confused, or had no clue how to approach the incident?

Practicality: Your scenarios need to be practical, based on real-world incidents or attacks that your company may face. They shouldn’t be too hypothetical drawing relevance out of the picture.

Creating practical, realistic scenarios will help you simulate conditions your security team may face during a real-life attack. This will also test your incident response strategies effectively and find areas to improve that you may not get with a hypothetical scenario.

To measure the practicality of your scenarios, find:

Did the scenario resemble real threats relevant to the organisation based on the type of industry or business type like healthcare, finance, IT, etc.?
Was the threat behaviour realistic enough? What are their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for attacks?
Did the participants test current security controls like IDS/IPS, firewalls, etc. during the tabletop exercise? How did these tools perform?
You can also define a scenario practicality score as your KPI. Ask participants to rate on a scale of 1-10 how closely the scenario resembled a real-world security incident.

Communication Gaps

The communication between your cybersecurity team members and other teams like legal, IT, PR, etc., must be open and clear without any bottlenecks.

Miscommunication and poor coordination can worsen the situation, especially when you’re under attack. It could lead to confusion, errors, and delays in detection, reporting, and response. As a result, attackers will take more time to penetrate organisational infrastructure and cause more harm.

This is why it’s important to measure communication and coordination gaps between teams for appropriate training and improvements. To measure this KPI, find out:

How promptly did the participants share vital data and insights with other teams?
Did they communicate roles, responsibilities, plans, etc. clearly?
When did they involve key decision-makers or stakeholders in the remediation discussion? How accurate and effective was the reporting?
Did they follow applicable communication protocols?

You can also ask participants to rate on a scale how effective they felt the communication was and the flow of information. In addition, track the number of interactions between different teams.

Regulatory Compliance

According to the University of Maryland, a cyberattack happens every 39 seconds, compromising systems and data.

This is why regulatory compliance bodies, including UK GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS require organisations to abide by their requirements. It’s especially crucial for heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, military, finance, and more. Non-compliance can result in heavy penalties and tarnish your reputation.

To measure regulatory compliance, find out:

Did the participants adhere to compliance requirements?
How do they manage business and use data?
Did they document important information, actions, and results?
Did they prepare reports? How was the quality - accuracy, completeness, consistency, and relevance?

These answers will help you find out if the participants followed compliance requirements during the tabletop exercise and how effectively. This way, you can find issues in the process and make adjustments.

Resources

During a security incident, you need to manage your resources strategically to give attackers a solid fightback. You’ll need to efficiently allocate resources and ensure team members utilise them well while detecting, containing, and responding to an incident. Overuse or misallocation can affect your incident response plan.

Thus, resource utilisation and allocation are important metrics to measure to understand your tabletop exercise’s effectiveness. To calculate this metric, find out:

How do participants allocate available resources, such as staff, technologies, tools, etc. during the exercise?
Did they utilise resources efficiently?
What resources were used, when, and where?
Are there any underused or overused resources? Who was responsible and what was the reason?

Obtaining insights from these answers will help you train your staff on how to allocate and use resources in hand efficiently during an attack.

Post-TTX Analysis

Analysing a tabletop exercise after its completion provides you with important insights. Tabletop exercise after-action report will help you find how good the exercise was and areas of improvement. In addition, you will be able to identify gaps in your incident response strategies and optimise them.

To measure this KPI:

Assess participant performance: Evaluate performance via questionnaires and by analysing data from the exercise. Find out:

if the goals were met
the challenges the participants encountered, and
how well they tackled the scenario.

Seek feedback from participants: Take feedback via anonymous surveys, interviews, polls, etc. Determine:

Were exercise objectives clear to participants?
Did the scenario seem realistic?
How confident were they in their capacity?
How effective was information flow and communication?

Review the exercise: Review by scenario, goals, and metrics for success. List the lessons learned from the exercise, create follow-up exercises, and update your incident response plans.

Facilitator’s performance: Evaluate the tabletop exercise facilitator’s performance by process quality, scenario realism, goal clarity, etc. Decide whether the facilitator’s exercise complements your security goals and current requirements.

By analysing post-TTX data, you will be able to identify areas for training, adjusting security processes, and improving scenario design and the quality of exercises and facilitation.

Security Flaws

An organisation’s cybersecurity strategy can have certain flaws, such as insufficient resources, poor communications, inadequate security risk assessments, technology gaps, legacy systems, lack of solid risk mitigation strategies, and more.

Conducting tabletop exercises helps you detect flaws in your cybersecurity strategy. This is one of the big benefits of tabletop exercises for businesses. It’s like shooting two birds with a single bow - you get to enhance your cyber preparedness while analysing security gaps.

To measure the effectiveness of your tabletop exercises, determine how efficient they are at detecting security flaws. For this, conduct a security gap analysis:

Which participants struggled with their roles and responsibilities?
What systems and data need high protection?
What procedures and steps were ineffective or missing?
Which security mechanisms or tools underperformed?

Insights from these answers will help you improve your overall security strategy by addressing those issues, creating a better incident response plan, and training teams extensively.

Best Practices While Measuring TTX Effectiveness

Consider the below best practices while measuring the effectiveness of your tabletop exercises:

Set Clear Goals

The goals of your tabletop exercises must be clear to participants. Ensure they are measurable too, so you can evaluate their effectiveness. Ask yourself what you want to achieve with a specific tabletop exercise - is it:

Improving your communications?
Enhancing response times?
Complying with regulations better?

Ensure the exercise goal aligns with your organisation’s security goals.

Compare Past and Present Outcomes

To improve the effectiveness of your tabletop exercises, compare your present and past outcomes. It will help you understand how far you’ve come along your security journey and continuous improvement framework. You will be able to track the changes in:

Response times
Coordination and communications between team members and across teams
Success rates in incident detection and response
Meeting regulatory requirements
The security posture of your company

Use these insights to find your strengths and double down on them. Similarly, find weaknesses and improve them.

Regular Exercises

To keep up with emerging threats, it’s necessary to conduct tabletop exercises regularly. You can do it once a quarter or twice a year based on your attack surface. This will help your team stay updated with new attacks and how to tackle them. You can also adapt your incident response plan to meet growing needs.

How Can Microminder Help?

Conducting cybersecurity tabletop exercises is not enough; you must assess their effectiveness as well. It will help you find gaps in your security strategies and improve them while training your team members to handle cyberattacks head-on.

If you’re looking for an experienced facilitator to conduct tabletop exercises, we at Microminder CS can help you. Our extensive, realistic tabletop exercises are designed to strengthen your cyber defence and resilience against sophisticated attacks.

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