In this blog, I share why our clients who do ISO 27001 audits are including cyber attack tabletop exercises audits in their audit schedules.
Many of our clients who have been doing ISMS audits and other IT control assessments are now adding audits of cyber tabletop exercises to their audit schedules. These cyber incident response audits enable our clients to assess their breach-readiness providing insights into their ability and readiness to respond to a cyber-attack.
In this easy-to-read cybersecurity blog, we offer you a simple explanation of why you too should consider including our cybersecurity tabletop exercises audit into your regular ISO 27001 or ISMS audit schedule. (FYI, we refer to these as Cyber Crisis Tabletop Exercises or CCTEs)
Cyber Management Alliance has a large network of global CISOs and cybersecurity executives and we asked them a simple question. To summarise their answers, the reasons they do ISMS audits and/OR other IT-Security control audits are:
So, my answer to the above question of stopping your ISMS audits. No. However, it is our opinion that you must include our cyber table top exercise audits in your schedule this year onward. Why? Read on.
Yes, an ISO 27001 audit provides you visibility about the effectiveness of your approximately 100 controls but it stops there. An ISO 27001 audit does not answer two questions we asked earlier.
An ISMS audit OR generic IT-Control audit provides you little to zero clear insight into your organisation’s breach-readiness; its ability and capability to rapidly respond and recover from a cyber-attack.
Before you do anything, you must decide to run a cyber tabletop exercise with either management participants or technical attendees. Next:
Finally, you need an experienced facilitator who can hold your audience and engage with the participants.
Once you have all your ducks in order and you have the suitable participants, you now need to ensure that you measure what is taking place during the actual cyber response exercise. What does that mean? It is our experience and opinion that a properly run cyber response test provides tremendous insight into how the participants will actually perform in a real cyber crisis.
At CM-Alliance, we have the expertise, the experience and requisite skills to support you in hosting a productive and effective cyber crisis tabletop exercise. We work with you on planning, creating scenarios, producing the scripts and artefacts and running the actual workshop. We can run a complete cyber tabletop exercise virtually using Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google's Meet (previously known as Hangout)
Importantly, we will present you a formal audit report of the exercise that provides you with important data including a cyber breach-readiness score that provides a good indication about how ready you are to respond to a specific cyber-attack scenario.
If you want to know more about how to plan, produce and conduct an effective Cyber Crisis Tabletop Exercise, don't forget to check out our Cyber Tabletop Exercise Training.