Cyber crisis exercise for an Executive Committee and operational teams

Context

A major company in the defence sector asked Alcyconie to carry out a cyber crisis exercise for its CERT and the Executive Committee in order to raise their awareness of the complexity and plurality of the impacts of a cyber crisis in a context of strong international tensions.

Objectifs

• Realistically illustrate the type of threat that this type of organization could face;
• Raise the Executive Committee’s awareness of decision-making in a degraded context of cyber origin with a strong risk to the company’s reputation;
• Test the coordination between the COMEX unit and the operational unit;
• Test the ability to define a remediation strategy by considering the international nature of the technical teams and the heterogeneity of practices;
• Analyze the adequacy of group crisis procedures with the specificities of a cyber crisis.

Mission Description

The exercise took place over 2 half-days in order to illustrate the progressive mobilization of the decision-making unit.

The first half-day gradually brought the technical teams on board in order to test the incident qualification and escalation process.

The second half-day put the COMEX crisis unit in a situation after a quick briefing by the technical teams on the progress of the crisis in order to ensure coherence and continuity in the progress of the crisis management.

Challenges and specificities

This cyber crisis management exercise had the particularity of the international dimension of the company as well as its organizational complexity marked by a strong impact of the hierarchical layers in crisis management.

Alcyconie’s added value expertise

Thanks to their in-depth knowledge of the challenges of a cyber crisis for organizations in the defense sector, Alcyconie consultants have put their skills at the service of a realistic and coherent scenario, adapted to each of the trained audiences. This made it possible to make the Executive Committee aware of the essential arbitration that it must show for certain decisions in this type of situation, but also to illustrate the complexity of maintaining, in a crisis situation, the hierarchical organization of daily life, which sometimes reveals a greater need for agility.