Simulate cyber attack situations with Secure Practice, and make sure everyone who needs to be prepared are ready for action when a true crisis emerges.
Good preparedness is crucial when incidents occur. You should therefore train for cyber incidents in advance, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel when the hackers have already found their way in.
Secure Practice is now launching a simulator to allow preparing your own organization for everything you can imagine of unwanted events:
- Create exercises from scratch, or use our library of practice scenarios as a starting point for practice moments that meet current needs. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel for the rehearsal itself, too!
- Engage participants with a living story which adapts to decisions made along the way. SMS, phone calls, emails and websites are sent automatically.
- The tool facilitates better conversations and better decisions by allowing everyone to make up their own minds anonymously, before finally making decisions together. Automatic logging makes final reporting a breeze.
See the video above for an impression of how the tool works with a larger audience. In the picture below you can also see one of our customers trying out the simulator, where the participants receive an interesting phone call, all at the same time:
Preparedness is more about people than technology
As security professionals, we rarely lack good reasons and intentions in our efforts to protect our business from cyber attacks. At the same time, it can be challenging to get through with both the need for changes and, consequently, the changes themselves.
The simple reason for this may be that safety work is not just a technical exercise. It's transformational work. Leading change.
We depend on the organization, key people, and colleagues who have completely different job descriptions, goals and intentions than ourselves.
We can jokingly say that in order to become a good security leader, there are skills in Excel and PowerPoint that need to be developed. It is with hard facts and convincing arguments that results can be achieved when one no longer speaks to the "security choir."
John Kotter should however be a household name for those who are going to drive change management. In the book "The heart of change", we find the story of someone who was given responsibility for cutting costs in the industry company he worked for. But instead of delivering an Excel sheet to management, he collected 424 different pairs of gloves – from different brands and suppliers, and not least at different prices. Yes, different prices, even for completely identical gloves. With a price tag attached to everyone, he showed up at the management and delivered a huge pile of gloves to the conference table. "Huh, do we pay $3.22 and $10.55 for the exact same gloves? It's crazy!", could be heard among the leaders, who were left dumbfounded and astonished: "We MUST do something about this!"
Use exercises to prepare the organization
Similarly, cyber exercises – emergency preparedness exercises – can be an arena where people get to experience the importance of cyber security, and often also the absence of this.
Rather than hearing cold facts about risks, threats and vulnerabilities, you can simply feel a little about how you react even when the crisis hits.
At the same time, it is often the case that emergency preparedness exercises are carried out using Powerpoint, that it is perceived as resource-intensive to make the exercises more comprehensive and realistic, and that you are thus often left with a slightly less engaging tabletop exercise than you would have liked.
We have now done something about this when we launch a dedicated service for preparedness exercises in the Secure Practice platform.
The service is in many ways a simulator that allows you to practice an optional scenario, with interactive functionality. Compared to a desktop exercise in Powerpoint, our tool provides some useful capabilities:
- Give people the impression that the course of the practice scenario is influenced by choices they make along the way. With simple steps, you can define how decisions along the way will affect the visibility of next events.
- Deliver realistic touches of both email and SMS directly to participants' inboxes and mobile devices. Call participants on their phone with either pre-recorded audio clips or auto-generated speech from text you type.
- Spin the "wheel of misfortune" to give participants an experience of chance and eventual (un)luck. Maybe it would have gone much better/worse if something else had happened right there?
The exercise tool will be available to all our PLATINUM customers from April 2023. It will also be possible for anyone to purchase standalone access to individual exercises, including via our partners, who may also assist you on facilitating and follow-ups afterwards if desired.
At the same time, we would like to invite anyone who wants to try the tool for themselves to a free trial period with no strings attached, just contact us on support@securepractice.co and we will get you started!