Tabletop Exercises • Wargames • Incident Response
Your policies look great on paper. Your procedures make sense in a meeting room. But can your team execute under fire? We run the simulation so you find out before an adversary does.
Cyberattacks don't schedule appointments. When ransomware locks your systems at 2 a.m. or a sophisticated phishing campaign targets your finance team, the gap between a well-rehearsed organization and an unprepared one is measured in hours — and millions of dollars.
A tabletop exercise (TTX) — also called a cybersecurity wargame — is a facilitated, discussion-based simulation that walks your team through a realistic threat scenario. No real systems are touched. But the decisions are real, the gaps get exposed, and the muscle memory gets built.
Emergency services train relentlessly. Military units run war games constantly. Your cybersecurity team should be no different. Practice is how you earn the right to respond well under pressure.
Every TTX reveals something. A missing escalation path. An executive who doesn't know their role. A vendor contract that doesn't cover breach notification. These are the gaps you want to find in a simulation — not during an actual incident.
Every organization is at a different point in its security journey. Cranial Thunder meets you where you are — and takes you further.
You can't defend what you don't understand. This foundational exercise runs your actual policies, procedures, and response playbooks against a realistic threat scenario. We surface what's documented, what's missing, and what your team thinks they know vs. what they actually know.
Knowing what to do and being able to do it under pressure are very different things. This tier moves beyond documentation into repeated, scenario-driven practice. Your team builds true operational muscle memory — the kind that kicks in when adrenaline is high and the clock is running.
The attacks that cause the most damage are the ones nobody planned for. This tier pushes your team into genuinely unfamiliar territory: novel attack vectors, cascading failures, geopolitical scenarios, AI-assisted threats, and black-swan events. Advantage comes from having thought through the unthinkable.
Enterprise-grade security expertise, calibrated for companies that don't have enterprise-sized security teams. Adversaries don't scale their attacks to your headcount — your preparation shouldn't either.
You're a real target. Modern ransomware groups specifically hunt smaller organizations precisely because they're less defended. We bring Fortune 100 experience to your scale and budget.
Healthcare, finance, legal, manufacturing — if you carry compliance obligations, a documented TTX is evidence of due diligence. We align scenarios to HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and NIST frameworks.
Cyber incidents are business crises. Board members and executives need to know their role before the call from the FBI arrives. We run TTXs specifically designed for leadership teams.
Industrial controls, manufacturing systems, and OT environments carry unique risks. Physical safety and production uptime depend on cyber resilience. We've been there.
Brett Thorson has spent over three decades in the trenches of cybersecurity — from the early days of BBSs and the internet to the cutting edge of quantum computing and generative AI. His tabletop exercises have earned him a well-deserved nickname: the Master of Disaster.
As the Global Cybersecurity TTX Lead and Industrial Goods Cybersecurity Lead at Boston Consulting Group (BCG Platinion), Brett designed and ran tabletop exercises for some of the world's largest organizations — including Global Fortune 100 companies. He has led incident response coaching, threat intelligence programs, and security architecture engagements across financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, and federal sectors.
Before BCG, Brett spent 12 years as a contractor in the U.S. intelligence community, sharpening an adversarial mindset that now makes his TTX scenarios disturbingly realistic. He has worked with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), presented at the United Nations on cyber stability, and co-authored pieces for the Harvard Business Review on organizational cyber preparedness.
Today, Brett brings that same enterprise-grade rigor to Cranial Thunder — focused on helping smaller organizations build cyber resilience they can actually execute under pressure. The adversary doesn't care about your size. Your preparation should match the threat.
We assess your industry, crown jewels, and threat profile. Scenarios are built around your actual risk landscape, not generic templates.
We build the exercise collaboratively. Working directly with your key stakeholders, we craft scenarios that feel authentic to your environment, stress-test the things that actually keep you up at night, and land the specific lessons your team needs.
Facilitated simulation with your team. Real-time scenario evolution, targeted questioning, and structured decision tracking.
Detailed findings report with prioritized remediation roadmap. Gaps documented. Next exercise scoped. Progress measured.
A single tabletop exercise can reveal vulnerabilities that years of audits miss. Let's run the scenario that keeps your team up at night — before the adversary does.
Schedule a TTX TableTop@CranialThunder.com