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Vulnerability Assessment Tabletop Exercises: Identifying Weak Links

 
Sanjiv Cherian

Sanjiv Cherian, Cyber Security Director
Oct 28, 2024

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A vulnerability assessment tabletop exercise is an activity that helps improve your organisation’s attack readiness while detecting security vulnerabilities in your systems and processes.

A Statista report says that internet users globally found 52,000 new common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) as of August 2024.
Attackers are constantly on the lookout for vulnerabilities and exploit them. This is why organisations of all sizes must get to those weak links before hackers do and fix them immediately.

Conducting tabletop exercises allows you to achieve that, preparing and straightening your entire organisation, from entry-level executives to C-suite, to handle cyberattacks.

Let’s talk about what vulnerability assessment tabletop exercises are, their advantages, and how to create high-impact scenarios for these exercises.


What Are Vulnerability Assessment Tabletop Exercises?



Vulnerability assessment tabletop exercises are discussion-based, simulated activities in an organisation, involving facilitators, participants, and observers. Internal or third-party facilitators conduct various exercises as simulated scenarios that mimic real-world attacks due to security vulnerabilities present in the organisational network or systems.

The aim of a vulnerability assessment TTX is to assess, guide, and enhance your company’s cybersecurity preparedness. Offering valuable insights, these simulations help you detect and manage vulnerabilities before attackers do and protect your organisation from attacks, such as DDoS, phishing, ransomware, etc. This also shows how participants react and respond to scenarios in real time and helps improve your cyber defence strategy.


Weaknesses Identified in Vulnerability Assessment Tabletop Exercises



Tabletop exercises allow you to identify various vulnerabilities:

Human Errors

A 2024 Verizon report highlights that 68% of data breaches involved a human element (non-malicious), such as a person using weak passwords, becoming a social engineering attack victim, not updating software, and so on.

As a result of human errors, although unintentional, a business can lose confidential data to the wrong hands. It may expose trade secrets to competitors and lead to risks, such as customer trust, regulatory concerns, and financial damages.

A tabletop exercise on vulnerability assessment allows you to teach the implications of human errors to participants and adopt healthy security practices.

Outdated Technology and Protocols

Various types of hackers in cybersecurity actively look for vulnerabilities that legacy systems often have in plenty. So, you must constantly assess your systems for vulnerabilities like missed updates and patches, weak access permissions, encryption issues, etc. and address them, before they catch the eyes of cybercriminals.

Failing to bolster system security makes it easier for cybersecurity hackers to hack systems and compromise data.
Vulnerability assessment tabletop exercises test your systems’ defence against modern attacks. It lets you reveal vulnerabilities in your hardware and software systems, which enables you to address them on time before they convert into a security disaster.

Uncoordinated Response

If you don’t have a proper incident response procedure or your people don’t follow them, it may delay the response time, allowing a minor attack to spiral into a catastrophe.

Conducting vulnerability assessment tabletop exercises allows you to detect coordination issues in your organisation across teams and departments. You can find these gaps to create an effective response strategy with clear roles, responsibilities, and communication channels for everyone. This will reduce confusion and coordination issues and improve your incident response.

For example, during DDoS attack tabletop exercises, you can assign people responsible for declaring a breach, contacting customers and regulatory bodies, containing the attack, isolating unaffected systems, enabling incident response automation, and so on.

Third-Party Risks

A business may use different kinds of systems and software applications from third-party providers to ease various processes. For example, you may use project management software to streamline your projects and avoid missing deadlines or important details.

However, if you’re not careful while choosing a provider, it may introduce third-party vendor risks, such as bugs, unpatched vulnerabilities, etc. If an attacker finds these security vulnerabilities first, they can exploit them and damage your supply chain.

With tabletop exercises in cybersecurity, you can spot vulnerabilities even in third-party applications and eliminate them to stay safe.
Other issues you can find using a tabletop vulnerability exercise include malware infections in your systems, denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, application attacks, phishing attacks, and more.


Benefits of Conducting Vulnerability Assessment Tabletop Exercises



Let’s now look at some tabletop exercise benefits for vulnerability assessment:

Exposes Vulnerabilities

As discussed above, conducting a successful vulnerability assessment tabletop exercise allows you to detect hidden security vulnerabilities in your systems, network, and processes. This enables you to fix those vulnerabilities in time before attackers can exploit them and launch an attack.

Assessing not just the technology but also your processes and human capabilities is necessary. While traditional vulnerability assessments emphasise technical vulnerabilities only, tabletop security exercises cover issues related to people, processes, and technicality.

TTX detects technical vulnerabilities, like misconfigurations, unpatched systems, human errors, poor encryption, bugs, weak or compromised credentials, etc. It also exposes human- and process-related issues:

Coordination issues between teams
Ineffective decision-making
Poor protocols
Weak leadership

Forget about quick response, weak links like these may heighten the impacts of an attack.

Faster Incident Response Times

Every second matters when a cyberattack hits your organisation. You need to act faster when making decisions, finding the root cause, and containing the attack. Failing to do so may allow the attack to penetrate deeper into your organisational infrastructure, causing more damage financially, data-wise, and whatnot.

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, a data breach costs US$4.88 million (£3.77) on average globally.

So, the faster you detect and contain a data breach, the more costs and resources you can save.

With vulnerability assessment or disaster recovery tabletop exercises, you can evaluate how quickly the participants find and fix vulnerabilities and mitigate attacks. This practice helps them perform effectively in real-world cyberattack scenarios, reducing the potential impacts.

In addition, TTX exercises will shed light on the effectiveness of your incident response and disaster recovery planning and improve it to combat attacks head-on.

Boosts Coordination

When you face an attack, your entire organisation must unite and battle it. This requires strong coordination not just between security team members but also between different departments — marketing, legal, HR, etc.

For that to happen, people from every department and level, from entry-level executives to C-suite must know their roles and responsibilities in managing an attack.

A vulnerability assessment tabletop exercise is a great way to gather people from various departments in one place and train them. It gives you an opportunity to familiarise them with their roles and contribution to the organisation’s cyber resilience strategy. You can also identify issues people face in communication and collaboration and correct them.

For example, you may observe during a risk management tabletop exercise that there was a delay in informing the compliance team. As a result, the regulatory reporting process was delayed, which may raise questions from regulatory bodies. This represents a communication gap between the incident response and compliance team.

By taking this scenario as your exercise, you can address communication issues between the teams. You can also build clear communication channels and protocols should an attack surface.

Better Decision-Making

Effective leadership and the quality of decisions made make a huge difference between a solid, quick incident response and a widespread cyberattack.

During an attack, you have a very little window of time to act. It requires the upper management to make decisions faster under pressure. One wrong decision may lead to disastrous consequences for a business.

In a tabletop exercise, you can create an incident response simulation to evaluate the quality of decisions your leaders and C-suite executives make under pressure. It tells how they act to reduce the impacts of the attack and manage the crisis.

By practising these scenarios, leaders will get more confidence in dealing with real cyberattacks. This contributes to better crisis management and supports business continuity while reducing the likelihood of delays and costly errors.

Training and Awareness

Tabletop exercises can be an important part of your organisation’s training and skill development wing. You can conduct vulnerability assessment table exercises once every three months or six months to train people on new vulnerabilities and how to deal with them.

In addition, make them aware of the latest tools and technologies and how to leverage them in dealing with cyberattacks. You can also teach them internet security best practices, endpoint security strategy, etc., so they can help keep their personal data and organisational data safe.


How to Craft High-Impact Scenarios for Vulnerability Assessment Tabletop Exercises



Consider the following factors to create high-impact tabletop exercise scenarios:

Identify Risks

The threat landscape of one business may differ from another. The reason is every business is unique in terms of size, type, industry it operates in, audience it targets, security capabilities it has, and so on.

For example, a financial institution may face security risks different from those of a manufacturing company.

Therefore, before you brainstorm a scenario, identify the security and risks frequent in your organisation. You can conduct a risk assessment to find out:

The security attacks you’ve faced previously
Risks specific to your industry or location
How effective were your methodology or tools to eliminate attacks?

Prepare your scenarios based on the answers to the above questions. It will ensure the exercises are aligned with your industry- or organisation-specific risks.

Be Realistic
Realism is one of the most important components of a tabletop exercise. Although hypothetical, you need to frame a realistic story behind an exercise so the participants feel genuinely invested in it.

To craft a realistic-looking scenario, study some real-world cyberattacks. Observe how it started, understand its root cause, how it escalated, its consequences, and how it was contained or mitigated.

Use the insights and incorporate the complexity, subtle nuances, and minute details while building your scenarios. This will add depth and realism to your exercise.

For example, a marketing executive clicks a malicious link which downloads malware on their system. The hacker silently exfiltrates data, which creates an abnormal outbound traffic but the IT team ignores it thinking it’s a minor issue. Meanwhile, the attacker, after downloading the data and locking down systems, deploys ransomware. They demand heavy ransom to give back access to systems and confidential marketing data.

Simulate Urgency and Pressure

In real-world attacks, teams are under immense pressure to detect, contain, and eliminate the attack urgently. It requires making tough and quick decisions, often without complete context.

To make the exercise look more realistic, include a sense of urgency and pressure in your scenarios.

For example, you can create a time-sensitive activity where an attacker has already compromised a system and has begun affecting other systems. Test how your leaders make quick, effective decisions to contain the attack and the way other participants act to reduce the impact.

The objective behind this is to evaluate how participants handle stress. It also reflects how they coordinate with each other and follow the cyber attack response plan.

Stay Updated with Trends

Cyberattackers constantly deploy new methods and technologies to launch their malicious intent. This is why it’s necessary to stay updated with recent events in the field of cybersecurity.

Prepare scenarios based not only on historical events but also latest trends to improve your organisation’s preparedness against advanced attacks.

For example, AI-powered malware is trending these days. You can create a scenario where your organisation is hit with such malware and evaluate how participants tackle it.


Craft Realistic, Business-Specific Tabletop Exercises with Microminder CS


Creating regular, high-impact vulnerability tabletop exercises prepares your organisation to handle real-world attacks efficiently.

Allow Microminder’s security experts to conduct realistic-looking tabletop exercises specific to your business and industry. Our exercise scenarios are based on real-world cyberattacks and inspired by recent events to test your participants’ attack readiness

Order your first cybersecurity tabletop exercise by discussing your unique security risks with us. Get started today!

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FAQs

What is a tabletop security exercise?

A tabletop security exercise is an activity that helps enhance the cybersecurity preparedness of an organisation with the help of simulated scenarios.

What is meant by vulnerability assessment?

A vulnerability assessment is a process of evaluating security vulnerabilities in an organisation’s systems and networks that attackers can exploit. It also assigns a severity grade to each vulnerability found and provides recommendations to fix it.

Who should be involved in a tabletop exercise?

A cybersecurity tabletop exercise must involve people from across the organisation, especially those in operational or leadership roles.

A tabletop security exercise is an activity that helps enhance the cybersecurity preparedness of an organisation with the help of simulated scenarios.

A vulnerability assessment is a process of evaluating security vulnerabilities in an organisation’s systems and networks that attackers can exploit. It also assigns a severity grade to each vulnerability found and provides recommendations to fix it.

A cybersecurity tabletop exercise must involve people from across the organisation, especially those in operational or leadership roles.

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