JULY 2025AUTOTECHOUTLOOK.COM8IN MY OPINIONBUILDING RESILIENT TEAMS THROUGH TABLETOP EXERCISESBy Jason Brown, Information Technology Security Manager, The Shyft Group [Nasdaq: SHYF]Preparing for your next incidentWith ransomware attacks on the rise, incident response has become an important area for cybersecurity. Frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and ISO 27001 have dedicated sections for how a company should prepare for a cyber incident. Regulatory bodies are also requiring documentation such as policies and procedures, and proof that you are following that documentation. From containment, eradication, to getting the business back to a known good running state, preparing for an incident is just as important as ensuring company resiliency.It takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, which is a considerable amount of time. Think of all that needs to be accomplished in each day. From email, to presentations, and to responding to incidents, who has time to develop new skills? Having documentation is just one step, however; how do you train your teams to also respond to an incident appropriately?Tabletop ExercisesRunning tabletop exercises is one sure way of training your team on incident response. Tabletop exercises do not have to cost any money and can be question and answer based. Take a incident that may have happened to your company, or an issue that you may have read about and develop 4 ­ 6 scenario questions. These scenarios can then have a total of 2 or more sub-questions to be asked based on that scenario.Live Action Tabletop ExercisesLive action exercises require more technical thinking. Live action scenarios can include the use of desktops, servers, networking equipment, anything in the environment that could be used to train the employees how to troubleshoot, contain, and eradicate an adversary from your network. For example, you could have a scenario where a server is infected, or a switch configuration was changed. How would you go about training your staff on how to troubleshoot or identify the source of the change? Q&A based tabletop exercises can only provide so much detail and information, sometimes you just need to get your hands on a keyboard to truly know what to do.Jason Brown
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