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Plan major-event red-team training around the systems and dependencies the event actually relies on, then test whether the right people can detect, coordinate, respond, and recover. Use tabletop exercises to examine decisions without live intrusion; reserve technical red-team assessments for explicitly authorized, scoped, and coordinated testing.
What should major-event red-team training test?
The goal is not to reproduce an attack for its own sake. It is to find out whether the event’s people, plans, and controls can manage a plausible disruption to essential operations and attendee safety. That means connecting cyber response with event operations, physical security, continuity, communications, and relevant vendors.
CISA’s exercise resources cover ransomware, insider threats, phishing, and industrial control system (ICS) compromise. Its broader exercise materials also include physical-security and cyber-physical scenarios. These are useful starting points, not a checklist every event must use. No single universal major-event security assurance standard is established by these materials; treat them as general U.S. federal exercise and resilience guidance, not jurisdiction-specific legal or venue-compliance advice.
Which scenarios belong in the exercise?
Start with the event’s technology and dependencies: identify the services, facilities, communications, and vendors whose failure could affect operations or safety. Then select scenarios that test a defined decision or control. CISA’s Cybersecurity Tabletop Exercise Packages (CTEPs) provide planners with scenarios and templates for examining plans and capabilities.
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| Scenario | When it may fit | Defensive question to exercise |
|---|---|---|
| Phishing or credential compromise | When staff, contractors, or vendors depend on accounts to access event systems | Who recognizes and reports a suspicious access event, and how do security and IT coordinate investigation and containment? |
| Ransomware | When event operations depend on systems or data that could become unavailable | Which services take priority for continuity, and who decides whether operations must change? |
| Insider threat | When personnel or contractors have access to sensitive systems, information, or facilities | How are concerns escalated, and who coordinates the response across organizational boundaries? |
| ICS compromise | When operational technology or industrial control systems are part of the event environment | How do system owners and event leadership assess operational and safety implications and coordinate a response? |
| Physical-security disruption with cyber effects | When a cyber incident could affect physical security, or a physical disruption could affect technology-dependent operations | How do cyber, physical-security, and event-operation leads share information and make coordinated decisions? |
The exercise questions in the table are planning prompts, not attack procedures or prescribed CISA scoring criteria. To prioritize candidates, consider four factors:
- Potential consequence: Could the scenario affect attendee safety or essential event operations?
- Dependency: Does it involve technology, communications, vendors, facilities, or other services the event relies on?
- Environment-specific exposure: Is the scenario plausible for the organizer’s actual systems and operating context?
- Testable response: Does it require a decision, handoff, communication, or control the exercise can meaningfully examine?
These factors are a practical selection framework; CISA’s resources establish scenario breadth but do not prescribe this scoring model.
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How does a tabletop exercise work?
A tabletop tests plans and coordination through discussion rather than live intrusion. CISA’s Tabletop Exercise Package: Exercise Planner Handbook (2021) defines a tabletop exercise as “a facilitated discussion of a scripted scenario in an informal, stress-free environment that is based on current applicable policies, plans, and procedures.” The facilitator introduces scenario updates, or injects, and participants discuss what they would do.
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Choose the decisions or capabilities to examine before writing the scenario. Objectives might include evaluating how an incident is escalated, how event leadership is notified, or how teams coordinate a continuity decision. State what the exercise will not test, such as live access to production systems. Ground the discussion in the organization’s applicable plans and procedures.
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Invite the people who own the response
Include the roles needed to make and carry out decisions: security, IT, event operations, communications, and relevant vendors. Add other stakeholders when their responsibilities are implicated by the scenario. Make handoffs visible; a tabletop can expose gaps that occur between teams even when each team has a plan of its own.
Use staged updates to prompt real decisions
Present information in stages rather than giving participants the full scenario at once. Each update should require a response grounded in actual procedures: who is contacted, who has authority to decide, what information is shared, and which operational dependencies need attention. Avoid turning injects into instructions for carrying out an intrusion.
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Record actions and unresolved gaps
Capture decisions, owners, handoffs, communications dependencies, and points where participants lack information or authority. Use those observations to identify changes to plans, coordination, or controls. The objective is to learn whether the response works across roles, not simply whether participants can describe a plan.
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A technical red-team assessment emulates threat actors to evaluate cyber detection and response; it is not the same as a tabletop conversation. CISA’s 2023 advisory describes a coordinated assessment in which a red team began with spearphishing and moved laterally toward sensitive business systems. The advisory’s account concerns a particular engagement conducted in 2022, not a universal event-security test or a general measure of threat prevalence.
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Use that case as a defensive discussion prompt: what telemetry, access controls, escalation paths, and response procedures should help the organization identify or contain similar behavior? CISA highlights monitoring, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication (MFA), and control validation as defensive improvements. These are areas to assess against the organization’s own environment, not a guarantee that any single control will prevent an incident.
Any live assessment must have explicit authorization, a defined scope, and coordination with event leadership and system owners. Set boundaries that protect event operations and safety, establish the points of contact and escalation path, and agree how a concern that could affect live services will be handled. CISA’s example was coordinated with the assessed organization; it is not permission to test systems without authorization.
How should leaders judge whether the exercise was useful?
Assess whether participants could apply their actual plans to the scenario and coordinate across the people and services involved. A useful review records specific decisions and gaps rather than relying on a general impression that the exercise went well.
- Could participants identify who had authority to make consequential decisions?
- Were security, IT, event operations, communications, and vendors able to share relevant information and make timely handoffs?
- Did the response account for physical security, continuity, communications, and operational dependencies as well as cyber issues?
- Did participants identify which controls or procedures would need validation, improvement, or clarification?
- Were gaps assigned to owners for follow-up?
Revisit the affected plans and procedures after the exercise, and document who will address each gap. CISA’s exercise materials support examining plans and capabilities; they do not establish that completing a particular exercise certifies an event as secure.
How to choose the right exercise format
Use a tabletop when the main uncertainty is about decisions, roles, or coordination and you want to discuss response actions without live intrusion. Consider a technical assessment when the objective requires evaluating detection and response capabilities through authorized testing. The formats answer different questions, and neither substitutes for clearly defined objectives, scope, and follow-up.
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