Cyber Incident Response Training & Tabletop Exercises

Rehearse your response to a cyber attack before you have to do it for real.

When a cyber incident hits, the decisions made in the first hours shape the outcome: who is in charge, what gets shut down, who needs to be told and when. Organisations that have practised respond faster and more calmly, and recover with less damage.

Our incident response training uses realistic, scenario-based exercises to test your plans and build your team's confidence. It is designed and run by the people behind our incident response and digital forensics services, so the scenarios reflect how real incidents unfold.

Enquire About Incident Response Training

Book a Tabletop Exercise

What Is Incident Response Training?

Incident response training prepares your people to detect, contain and recover from cyber incidents. A tabletop exercise walks a group through a simulated incident, such as ransomware, a data breach or a compromised supplier, as it develops, with each stage bringing new information and decisions.

Exercises can be aimed at technical teams, at leadership, or at both together, and can be used to test an existing incident response plan or to help shape a new one.

Two colleagues looking at a computer screen

Why Exercise Your Incident Response?

An incident response plan that has never been tested often fails in ways nobody expected: contact details are out of date, responsibilities overlap, decisions stall waiting for approval, or key systems turn out to depend on each other.

Exercises find those gaps safely, build working relationships between technical, leadership, legal and communications teams, and give you evidence of preparedness for insurers, regulators, auditors and customers.

What We Offer

Executive tabletop exercises

Scenario-based sessions for leadership teams, focused on decision-making, communication, regulatory reporting and business continuity during a serious incident.

Technical response exercises

Scenarios for IT and security teams covering detection, investigation, containment, evidence preservation and recovery.

Tailored scenarios

Scenarios built around your organisation, sector, systems and the threats most relevant to you, such as ransomware, business email compromise, insider threats or a supplier compromise.

Incident response plan review

A review of your plan and playbooks before or after an exercise, with practical recommendations to strengthen them.

Post-exercise report and debrief

A report on what went well, the gaps identified and prioritised improvements, and a debrief with your team.

Our Approach

Group working on laptops around a table in a red-lit room

01

Objectives

We agree what you want to test and who should take part, and review your existing plans and policies.

02

Scenario design

We design a realistic scenario tailored to your organisation, with stages and injects that test the decisions that matter.

03

Exercise delivery

Our facilitators run the exercise, keep it realistic and on track, and record decisions and observations.

04

Report and debrief

We talk you through what we observed and provide a report with prioritised recommendations to improve your plans and capability.

Why Choose Samurai Security?

Real incident experience

Our exercises are designed by the team that delivers our incident response and digital forensics services.

01

Tailored, not off the shelf

Every scenario is built around your organisation, systems and threats, so the lessons apply directly.

02

From exercise to improvement

We can help you act on the findings, from updating plans to retainers and managed detection and response.

03

Our Work

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Strengthening Cybersecurity Resilience

“Samurai takes the time to understand our needs and helps us to be an enabler for Flagship Group’s mission. It’s always a pleasure to work with them and I’d recommend them to others.”

Enabling Remote Work for the NHS

“When I have a problem nobody else can solve, I call Samurai because I know that they’ll deliver what I need, every time, without fail.”

Incident Response Retainers To Enable Growth

“This partnership has allowed us to scale and grow with the confidence that we are protected from cyber threats around the clock.”

Client Testimonials

“Samurai takes the time to understand our needs and helps us to be an enabler for Flagship Group’s mission. It’s always a pleasure to work with them and I’d recommend them to others.”

“We were astonished by what Samurai’s Black Dragon assessment revealed, even though we thought we had everything covered. The findings spoke for themselves, and the team’s expertise and clarity were outstanding.”

"Samurai’s Black Dragon: Attack Surface Risk Assessment was exactly what we needed and something we’ve never seen done before. They turned it around quickly, highlighted risks that could have easily been overlooked, and gave us a clear roadmap for improvement."

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tabletop exercise?

A tabletop exercise is a discussion-based simulation in which participants work through a realistic cyber incident scenario as it develops, making the decisions they would make in a real incident.

Who should take part?

That depends on the objectives. Executive exercises typically involve leadership, legal, communications and operations; technical exercises involve IT, security and service providers. Some organisations run both.