Incident response is an organized, strategic approach to detecting and managing cyber attacks in ways that limit damage, recovery time and costs. This guide shows how to establish an incident response strategy. It then outlines steps needed to craft a plan and put in place the team and tools required to minimize the fallout when a cyber attack hits your organization.

Have an incident response plan but aren't running incident response tabletop exercises? These simulations are key to knowing if your plan will work during an actual security event.

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• Paul Kirvan

What is an incident response tabletop exercise?

An incident response tabletop exercise is an activity that involves testing the processes outlined in an incident response plan. Attack simulations are run to ensure incident response team members know their roles and responsibilities -- as well as the tools and processes to use -- in response to a given attack scenario.

Incident response tabletop exercises can be discussion-based or operational:

• Discussion-based tabletop exercises involve the incident response team talking through the events of a specific security incident.
• Operational exercises involve hands-on and discussion-based activities.

Exercises offer the following benefits:

• Validate the effectiveness of an incident response plan.
• Identify and solidify plan procedures that work and correct any ...