Tag Archives: table top incident response exercises

Utility Tabletop Cybersecurity Exercises

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Recently, a group of federal partners, comprised of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) and it’s regional entities released their Cyber Planning for Response and Recovery Study (CYPRES). The report was based on a review and analysis of the incident response and recovery capabilities of a set of their member’s cyber security units, and is a great example of some of the information sharing that is increasing in the industry. The report included reviews of eight utility companies’ incident response plans for critical infrastructure environments, and the programs reviewed varied in their size, complexity and maturity, though all were public utilities.

Though the specific tactics suggested in the report’s findings have come under fire and criticism, a few items emerged that were of broad agreement. The first is that most successful programs are based on NIST 800-61, which is a fantastic framework for incident response plans. Secondly, the report discusses how useful tabletop exercises are for practicing responses to cybersecurity threats and re-enforcing the lessons learned feedback loop to improve capabilities. As a result, each public utility should strongly consider implementing periodic tabletop exercises as a part of their cyber security and risk management programs.

Tabletop Exercises from MSI

At MicroSolved, we have been running cyber security tabletop exercises for our clients for more than a decade. We have a proprietary methodology for building out the role playing scenarios and using real-world threat intelligence and results from the client’s vulnerability management tools in the simulation. Our scenarios are developed into simulation modules, pre-approved by the client, and also include a variety of randomized events and nuances to more precisely simulate real life. During the tabletop exercise, we also leverage a custom written gaming management system to handle all event details, track game time and handle the randomization nuances.

Our tabletop exercise process is performed by two MSI team members. The first acts as the simulation moderator and “game master”, presenting the scenarios and tracking the various open threads as the simulation progresses. The second team member is an “observer” and they are skilled risk management team members who pre-review your incident response policies, procedures and documentation so that they can then prepare a gap analysis after the simulation. The gap analysis compares your performance during the game to the process and procedure requirements described and notes any differences, weaknesses or suggestions for improvement.

Target scenarios can be created to test any division of the organization, wide scale attacks or deeply nuanced compromises of specific lines of business. Various utility systems can be impacted in the simulation, including business networks, payment processing, EDI/supply chain, metering/AMI/smart grid, ICS/SCADA or other mission critical systems.Combination and cascading failures, disaster recovery and business continuity can also be modeled. In short, just about any cyber risks can be a part of the exercise.

Tabletop Exercise Outcomes and Deliverables

Our tabletop exercises result in a variety of detailed reports and a knowledge transfer session, if desired. The reports include the results of the policy/procedure review and gap analysis, a description of the simulated incident and an action plan for future improvements. If desired, a board level executive summary can also be included, suitable for presentation to boards, management teams, direct oversight groups, Public Utility Commission and Homeland Security auditors as well.

These reports will discuss the security measures tested, and provide advice on proactive controls that can be implemented, enhanced, matured or practiced in order to display capabilities in future incidents that reflect the ability to perform more rapid and efficient recovery.

The knowledge transfer session is your team’s chance to ask questions about the process, learn more about the gaps observed in their performance and discuss the lessons learned, suggestions and controls that call for improvement. Of course the session can include discussions of related initiatives and provide for contact information exchange with our team members, in the event that they can assist your team in the future. The knowledge transfer session can also be performed after your team has a chance to perform a major review of the reports and findings.

How to Get Started on Tabletop Exercises from MSI

Tabletop exercises are available from our team for cyber security incidents, disaster preparedness and response or business continuity functions. Exercises are available on an ad-hoc, 1 year, 2 year or 3 year subscription packages with frequencies ranging from quarterly to twice per year or yearly. Our team’s experience is applicable to all utility cyber programs and can include any required government partners, government agencies or regulators as appropriate.

Our team can help develop the scope of threats, cyber attacks or emergency events to be simulated. Common current examples include ransomware, phishing-based account compromises, cyber attacks that coincide with catastrophic events or service disruptions, physical attacks against substations or natural gas pipelines, data breach and compromise of various parts of the ICS/SCADA infrastructure. Our team will work with you to ensure that the scenario meets all of your important points and concerns.

Once the scenario is approved, we will schedule the simulation (which can be easily performed via web-conference to reduce travel costs and facilitate easy team attendance) and build the nuances to create the effects of a real event. Once completed, the reporting and knowledge transfer sessions can follow each instance.

Tabletop exercises can go a long way to increasing cybersecurity preparedness and re-enforcing the cybersecurity mindset of your team. It can also be a great opportunity for increasing IT/OT cooperation and strengthening relationships between those team members.

To get started, simply contact us via this web form or give us a call at (614) 351-1237. We would love to discuss tabletop exercises with you and help you leverage them to increase your security posture.

 

Ransomware TableTop Exercises

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When it comes to Ransomware, it’s generally a good idea to have some contingency and planning before your organization is faced with a real life issue. Here at MicroSolved we offer tabletop exercises tailored to this growing epidemic in information technology. 

 

What if your organization was affected by the Golden Eye or WannaCry today? How quick would you be able to react? Is someone looking at your router or server log files? Is this person clearly defined? How about separation of duties? Is the person looking over the log files also uncharge of escalating an issue to higher management?

 

How long would it take for you organization to even know if it was affected? Who would be in-charge of quarantining the systems? Are you doing frequent backups? Would you bet your documents on it? To answer these questions and a whole lot more it would be beneficial to do a table top exercise. 

 

A table top exercise should be implemented on an annual basis to evaluate organizational cyber incident prevention, mitigation, detection and response readiness, resources and strategies form the organizations respective Incident Response Team. 

 

As you approach an incident response there are a few things to keep in mind:

 

  1. Threat Intelligence and Preparation

An active threat intelligence will help your organization to Analyze, Organize and refine information about potential attacks that could threaten the organization as a whole.

After you gain Threat Intelligence, then there needs to be a contingency plan in place for what to do incase of an incident. Because threats are constantly changing this document shouldn’t be concrete, but more a living document, that can change with active threats.

  1. Detection and Alerting

The IT personal that are in place for Detection and Alerting should be clearly defined in this contingency plan. What is your organizations policy and procedure for frequency that the IT pro’s look at log files, network traffic for any kind of intrusion?

  1. Response and Continuity

When an intrusion is identified, who is responsible for responding? This response team should be different then the team that is in charge of “Detection and Alerting”. Your organization should make a clearly outlined plan that handles response. The worse thing is finding out you don’t do frequent backups of your data, when you need those backups! 

  1. Restoring Trust

After the incident is over, how are you going to gain the trust of your customers? How would they know there data was safe/ is safe? There should be a clearly defined policy that would help to mitigate any doubt to your consumers. 

  1. After Action Review

What went wrong? Murphy’s law states that when something can go wrong it will. What was the major obstacles? How can this be prevented in the future? This would be a great time to take lessons learned and place them into the contingency plan for future. The best way to lesson the impact of Murphy, is to figure out you have an issue on a table top exercise, then in a real life emergency! 


This post was written by Jeffrey McClure.

Incident Response: Practice Makes Perfect

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Is it possible to keep information secure? Read on to find out.

IF there is only one person that knows the information, IF that person never writes that information down or records it electronically, and IF that person is lucky enough not to blurt out the information while they are sleeping, drugged or injured, then the answer is yes…probably. Under any other conditions, then the answer is an emphatic NO! It is an unfortunate truth that no system ever developed to protect the security of information is perfect; they all can be breached one way or another. That is why it is so important to have a good incident response program in place at your organization.

And most of you out there, I’m sure, have an incident response plan in place. All information security standards organizations such as ISO and NIST include incident response in their guidance, and many of you are required to have incident response programs in place in order to comply with regulation. But how many of you practice responding to incidents to make sure your planning actually works? At MicroSolved, we’ve been involved in reviewing, developing and testing information security incident response programs for many years. And we have found that no matter how good response plans looks on paper, they’re just not effective if you don’t practice them. Practicing doesn’t have to be a big chore, either. We’ve helped many organizations conduct table top incident response exercises and they usually only last a few hours. They’ve never failed to produce valuable returns.

Unfortunately, there are no good incident response exercise frameworks available out there – we’ve looked. But it is not hard to create your own. Simply pick a type of incident you want to practice – a malware attack for example. You imagine what such an attack would look like to your help desk personnel, system administrators, security personnel, etc. and construct a scenario from that. You just need a basic outline since the details of the response will construct themselves as you proceed with the exercise.

What we have found from conducting and observing these exercises is that problems with the written plan are always exposed. Sure, maybe the plan says that this group of people should be contacted, but is there a procedure for ensuring that list is always kept current in place? Have you made pre-arrangements with a forensic specialist in case you need one? Are the help desk personnel and desk top administrators trained in how to recognize the signs of an attack in process? These are the types of issues performing simple table top incident response exercises will reveal.

Perhaps you will be lucky and never experience a bad information security incident. But if you do, you will be very glad indeed if you have a well practiced information security incident response program in place!