Tabletop Exercise Services

Even the strongest incident response and business continuity plans fail when they're never put to the test. A tabletop exercise is the safest, fastest way to find the gaps in your plans before an attacker, an outage, or a regulator does.

SBS CyberSecurity facilitates realistic, scenario-driven tabletop exercises that test how your people, plans, and decisions hold up against today's most consequential threats, from ransomware and identity-based attacks to vendor outages and pandemic-level disruptions.

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What Is a Tabletop Exercise?

A tabletop exercise is a structured, discussion-based simulation that walks key personnel through a realistic emergency scenario, step by step and decision by decision. Participants make decisions in real time, with only the information they would have during a live event.

The goal isn't to test whether your team can recite a plan. The goal is to expose the assumptions, dependencies, role confusion, and blind spots that only surface under pressure.

SBS CyberSecurity Tabletop Exercises validate your incident response, business continuity, disaster recovery, and pandemic preparedness plans in a single, focused session, and produce examiner-ready documentation your team can act on immediately.

Why Tabletop Exercises Matter

Regulators expect them. Cyber insurers depend on them. Boards want assurance they've been done. But the strongest reason to run a tabletop exercise is more practical: Small gaps quickly become major problems during a real incident.

Validate Assumptions

Plans are full of assumptions: that backups are recoverable, that the on-call rotation is up to date, that your hosted core's service-level agreement matches your stated recovery time objective. Tabletop exercises surface those assumptions before they're tested in the real world.

Strengthen Coordination

Most incidents fail at the seams between teams. Exercises give IT, security, leadership, communications, operations, and business-line staff practice in making decisions together in the face of uncertainty.

Build Defensible Documentation

SBS-facilitated exercises produce after-action reports that demonstrate testing rigor to examiners, auditors, cyber insurers, and the board. The result is a defensible record of what was tested and what needs attention.

What a Tabletop Exercise with SBS Looks Like

Each SBS Tabletop Exercise is a guided incident simulation that drops your team into a realistic scenario and forces decisions under pressure, using only the information available at the time.

Tailored to Your Environment, Not a Template

Before the exercise, we review your continuity, incident response, and pandemic plans, plus your asset inventory. A 30-minute discovery call surfaces your highest-risk concerns and the scenarios that would actually hurt.

Scenario-Based, Not Script-Based

Each exercise is drawn from real incidents and mapped to your technology stack, vendor relationships, and regulatory profile, ranging from ransomware and vendor outages to deepfake fraud, core-service failures, and physical disasters.

Designed to Pull in the Whole Room

Our facilitators are trained to get your leadership and business lines talking, including lending, operations, wire, retail, and accounting.

Facilitated Debrief

Each scenario ends with structured discussion: what worked, what didn't, what assumptions broke, and what to take back to the plan.

Walk through detection, containment, notification, and recovery for the most consequential cyber events.

Ransomware: Detection, Containment, and Notification
Walk through your full response cycle from detection to regulatory notification.

Business Email Compromise and Ransomware
Tackle simultaneous wire fraud and encryption in a dual-threat scenario.

Third-Party Core Vendor Data Breach
Respond to a breach originating from a critical third-party service provider.

ATM Skimming: Investigation and Customer Notification
Manage a physical fraud discovery, forensic investigation, and notifications.

CATO: Exam-Ready Incident Response Walkthrough
Practice regulatory-quality documentation and decisions under exam pressure.

Test your ability to keep operations running through physical disasters, vendor outages, and infrastructure failures.

Core Service Provider Cyber Attack
Test your response when a critical vendor is hit and takes your operations offline.

Tornado: Facility Loss and Alternate Site Activation
Simulate physical destruction and activation of your alternate site.

Hurricane: Extended Displacement and Operations
Navigate extended facility downtime, staff safety, and customer continuity.

Fire: Facility Destruction and Business Recovery
Exercise total facility loss and your ability to sustain critical services.

Extended Power Outage and Generator Failure
Test your protocols when primary and backup power systems both fail.

Validate your continuity plans for public health emergencies and large-scale workforce disruption.

Pandemic Response and Business Continuity
Exercise remote operations and service delivery during a public health emergency.

Infectious Disease: Workforce and Operational Continuity
Test critical function staffing when a large share of your team is unavailable.

Pressure-test your team against the new generation of attacks powered by generative AI.

AI-Enhanced Ransomware with Dual Extortion
Face AI-powered attackers using advanced recon and simultaneous data extortion.

Deepfake Executive Impersonation and Business Email Compromise
Respond to AI-generated voice and video fraud targeting your team's identity checks.

AI-Assisted Insider Data Exfiltration
Respond to a breach originating from a critical third-party service provider.

A Typical Engagement

Format

A facilitated session, virtual or in-person, covering up to three scenarios

Standard Scenario Mix

One business continuity and disaster recovery scenario, one incident response scenario, and one pandemic preparedness scenario, with AI threat vectors woven in where applicable and standalone AI scenarios available on request

Prework

A 30-minute discovery call with your lead contact, plus consultant review of your documented plans and environment

Duration

Approximately two hours for three scenarios

Customization

Clients can customize the mix. Common swaps include replacing pandemic preparedness with a second incident response or AI threat scenario. Fully bespoke scenarios can also be added to address specific operational, technical, or regulatory concerns.

Who Should Participate

Effective tabletop exercises bring together everyone who would be in the room during a real event, which is rarely just IT.

Incident response and business continuity teams

IT, security, and infrastructure leadership

Executive leadership and the board

Business-line leaders

Communications, legal, HR, and compliance representatives

Managed service providers and critical vendors

The Deliverable: A Report Built for Examiners

SBS Tabletop Exercise reports go well beyond a 15-bullet summary. Each one is a detailed, narrative-driven document written in the third person and structured for regulators, auditors, and cyber insurers. The result is a document that your ISO, IT committee, board, examiners, and cyber insurance carrier can all use.

A typical SBS after-action report includes:

Executive summary of the exercise, participants, and scope
Attendance roster with names and titles
Scenario narratives describing each simulation and how the team worked through it
Discussion findings capturing where uncertainty surfaced, where roles were unclear, where planning and documentation were lacking, and where assumptions broke down
Plan gap analysis mapping findings against your documented plans and against applicable frameworks (FFIEC, NCUA, NIST, CRI, or others relevant to your industry)
Prioritized recommendations your team can act on immediately

Who Facilitates

SBS Tabletop Exercises are led by seasoned practitioners with years of hands-on experience. Our team includes former bank ISOs, emergency coordinators, career IT and operations leaders, and consultants with deep regulatory and cyber insurance experience. That background matters. Our facilitators have lived through real incidents at real banks, and they know which departments to prompt, which plan clauses don't match reality, and which questions examiners are about to ask.

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Built for Regulatory Expectations

Tabletop exercises are an explicit expectation across financial, healthcare, and other regulated sectors. SBS Tabletop Exercises are designed to surpass these expectations while delivering practical, operational value beyond compliance.

Financial institutions: FFIEC, NCUA, and NYDFS all require regular testing of incident response, business continuity, and disaster recovery plans.
Healthcare: The HIPAA Security Rule requires periodic testing and revision of contingency plans.
Payment card industry: PCI DSS requires annual incident response plan exercises.
All sectors: NIST SP 800-53 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework name tabletop exercises as a core testing method.

Why Choose SBS CyberSecurity?

Our passion is to guide and protect. Our objective is to be your trusted cybersecurity ally. It's in our nature to do more than merely provide a service — we aim to empower your team to make smarter, safer decisions. Our philosophy is built around three pillars that set us apart:

Cyber Advocates

Our experts don’t just speak tech — they translate it. We break down complex security concepts into clear, actionable guidance so your team feels confident and informed.

Proactive Approach

Our proprietary Information Security Program (ISP) Blueprint helps you shift from reactive compliance to proactive, strategic cybersecurity management.

Personalized Partnership

We listen first, then tailor solutions to your unique challenges. With SBS, you gain a trusted partner committed to your long-term success.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should we conduct tabletop exercises?

SBS recommends an annual tabletop exercise covering incident response, business continuity/disaster recovery, and pandemic preparedness, with multiple scenarios based on your organization's higher-risk threats, such as social engineering, AI, deepfakes, business email compromise, or ransomware. Scenarios that pose the greatest risk should be tested more frequently. This cadence aligns with FFIEC, NCUA, NYDFS, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST expectations.

How long does a tabletop exercise take?

A typical SBS engagement is a single, two-hour session covering three tailored scenarios. Longer or multisession formats are available on request.

What deliverables will we receive?

You will receive a detailed after-action report with scenario narratives, participant discussion findings, plan-gap analysis against applicable frameworks, and prioritized recommendations, written for your ISO, board, examiners, and cyber insurance carrier.

Do we need a documented incident response or business continuity plan first?

A documented plan is ideal but not required. A tabletop exercise can also serve as a discovery exercise that informs plan development.

Are the scenarios customized or pulled from a catalog?

Both. SBS maintains a library of more than 40 field-tested scenarios across four threat categories: incident response, business continuity and disaster recovery, pandemic preparedness, and AI-driven threats. Every scenario is then customized to your environment, vendor stack, and regulatory profile before the exercise. We do not run generic, off-the-shelf simulations.

Can you include our critical vendors?

Yes. Including key vendors strengthens the exercise and surfaces dependencies that are easy to miss in plan documentation.

Is the exercise virtual or in person?

Both options are available, depending on your team's geography, preferences, and the complexity of the scenario.

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