As cyber threats have evolved and expanded, cybersecurity has emerged as a threat to organizations across sectors, and there is more urgency than ever for companies to remain vigilant and prepared. Cybersecurity incidents can come with legal implications and lead to substantial financial losses, and members of the board must increasingly be involved and knowledgeable on cybersecurity to safeguard the company’s reputation – and their own. Tabletop exercises are a potent tool to help identify and address gaps, increase cooperation on cybersecurity goals, and build organizational “muscle memory” to respond to threats.

Risks for Companies and Boards

An indispensable component of cyber preparedness is the active engagement of organizational leadership, especially the board of directors. Insufficient cyber preparedness can result in serious legal implications for both the company and the board, including shareholder actions and derivative lawsuits. These mistakes can not only threaten the organization’s reputation and lead to substantial financial losses, but also affect the reputations of individual board members. This is especially significant for board members who serve on multiple boards, as their professional reputation and credibility are at stake. A derivative action against them could harm their standing across all the boards they serve.

An engaged and well-informed board is vital to building a resilient cyber defense and plays a critical role in mitigating the risk of legal actions. By actively participating in the cyber readiness process, the board can demonstrate its commitment to protecting the company and its stakeholders from cyber threats. When properly documented, this display of due diligence becomes a powerful defense against potential shareholder litigation or derivative lawsuits. It protects not just the company’s assets and reputation but also the board members’ personal reputations, reinforcing the importance of their roles in an increasingly interconnected corporate landscape.

Using Tabletops for Organizational Insights

Tabletop exercises offer a powerful platform to practice and evaluate response strategies to hypothetical cyber incidents. These simulated scenarios serve as a systematic, interactive, and low-risk method for teams to pinpoint vulnerabilities in existing protocols, improve coordination, and critically assess the decision-making process during crises. A recent study by the National Association of Corporate Directors underscores this imperative: 48% of company boards reported conducting a cyber-centric exercise in the year leading up to the survey.

These exercises generate valuable insights like response times, decision accuracy, coordination efficiency and communication effectiveness. Gathering these insights over several exercises helps organizations to discern patterns, track progress, and identify gaps that need to be addressed. More qualitatively, insights from these exercises can allow organizations insight into the subtleties of team dynamics, decision-making, and communication. Gaps or weaknesses in any of these areas are vulnerabilities that cyber criminals can exploit as entry points to a company’s system or facilities.

Tabletop exercises have additional benefits beyond identifying weaknesses in cyber preparedness. The exercises also allow stakeholders across different departments to collaborate, fostering an integrated communication culture within an organization. This practice, critical for effective cyber preparedness, does carry certain risks, including potential miscommunications and diverging departmental priorities. To address these challenges, organizations must prioritize establishing a structured, transparent communication system that mitigates such risks. Most importantly, tabletop exercises can allow organizations to develop a “cybersecurity muscle memory.”  By running through different scenarios and discussing various response strategies, organizations can strengthen their ability to detect, mitigate, and recover from security breaches

Making Tabletops Work for You

Tabletops are not “one-and-done” exercises. For maximum impact, companies should integrate the exercises into annual plans, adapting the scenarios to the rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape. Regular reviews of the exercises, incorporation of learned lessons, and ongoing adjustments to the exercises based on new threat intelligence are vital components of robust cyber preparedness. For companies uncertain about their starting point, tabletop exercises can be customized and scaled to meet the organization’s unique needs and risks. As the company evolves, the exercises can be tailored to tackle more complex scenarios and challenges. This customization ensures the exercises remain relevant, focusing on the company’s cybersecurity objectives. The surge in cyber threats underscores the need for leadership’s proactive approach to cybersecurity. Tabletop exercises are valuable tools to help corporate leaders and the board actively witness the effectiveness of the organization’s incident response capabilities and, thus, the risks they individually face.