Your team’s next TTX (probably) isn’t realistic enough to prep for attacks. Here's why

Gather the team. Debate a fictional breach. And pat yourselves on the back for playing along. 

Let’s be real: that’s a disaster dress-rehearsal. Not a simulated reality that tests and builds your team’s muscle memory for a sudden crisis—where the seconds matter and the stakes are high. 

What’s missing? 

Stress, chaos, and collaboration across every department (including your senior leadership) that feels the heat when an actual crisis occurs.

Are TTXs more theatre than preparatory exercise? 

With millions of devices crashing worldwide and more than 600 flight cancellations, CrowdStrike’s tech outage earlier this year is a stark reminder for anyone remotely connected to risk management and incident response: 

Crises can strike any business, at any time, for any number of reasons. 

To ensure business continuity and organizational resilience, testing and validating crisis response strategies is crucial. 

Traditional tabletop exercises (TTXs) have served as a valuable tool for simulating crisis scenarios, but as the threat landscape advances, so do the demands on our response capabilities. 

In a traditional TTX, you might gather around a table, follow a neat decision tree, and solve hypothetical problems. But real-world incidents aren’t so polite. They don’t wait for your legal team to weigh in or your PR team to draft a response. 

And they certainly don’t follow a script.

That’s where the cracks of traditional TTX begin to show.

Stress testing requires hyper realistic stressors

Traditional tabletop exercises often follow a generic “checkbox” approach, lacking the intensity and stress of a full-scale crisis simulation. 

Many follow a discussion-based “choose your own adventure” style static decision tree. They’re often difficult to adapt around specific sectors or even company structures—and they can easily be out of date by the time they’re organized. 

This means teams may not fully experience the pressure and chaos of a real incident, limiting the effectiveness of the TTX. 

Hack The Box (HTB) supports security programs for more than 1,500 global teams on the frontlines of incident response and security testing; one of the reasons why they continue to trust us boils down to our threat-landscape-connected expertise. 

This expertise—developed through working with government, enterprises, academic institutions, and one of the largest communities of ethical hackers—inspired the launch of our new Crisis Control solution. 

• Continuously benchmark and stress-test playbooks to identify further workforce development areas with clear insights, reporting, and next steps.

• Break collaboration silos. Bring together different teams, with diverse skills and objectives, all from different layers of the organization.

• Threat-connected-realism. Exercises are crafted using real-world scenarios, featuring live-fire attacks mapped to MITRE ATT&CK & NIST NICE.

• Dial up simulation intensity & specificity to increase the stakes for a specific department's processes, technologies, or security concerns. 

GET STARTED WITH CRISIS CONTROL

Crisis Control by Hack The Box

Crisis Control is an innovative AI-enhanced engagement transforming TTXs into dynamic, real-time breach and crisis simulations for global teams. Powered by AI and rooted in real-world incidents, it mirrors the mess of actual crises 

This realism is key to modern security challenges as "defenders think in lists. Attackers think in graphs." (John Lambert, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Security Research.)

Defenders often rely on structured, linear methods, while attackers exploit complex, interconnected relationships within systems. With its hyper relevant scenarios facilitated by experienced security professionals, Crisis Control can help defenders adapt their thinking to a more proactive, adversarial mindset. 

In a crisis, you do not have time to read a manual on how to act. You need to be battle-ready, and this is achievable only by repetition. Hack The Box puts you on the battlefield repeatedly, until a crisis feels like another day at work.

Haris Pylarinos, CEO and Founder, Hack The Box

With the new solution, we aim to improve preparedness and promote greater interdepartmental collaboration and communication when responding to cyber incidents. 

Instead of your team reading from a hypothetical script, they can wrestle with real incident artifacts based on emerging adversarial techniques, tactics, and procedures. 

AI-enhanced simulations mean scenarios that adapt to specific sectors, threat types, or even companies—ensuring that exercises reflect real-world challenges of crisis response, and allowing a better understanding of critical weaknesses, both in processes and workforce capabilities.

Crisis Control's AI capabilities enable instant threat research from a wide range of published data and produce insights to feed the scenario.

It can generate different new realistic injects at will—that can be tied to a set scenario and training audience. This significantly reduces the time frame to develop a more realistic exercise.

Crisis readiness is not the sole domain of security teams

Crisis response might start with front-line security teams immediately reacting to an incident, but phase two involves tight collaboration with legal, regulatory, and executive teams (and more) to tackle the broader “meta” challenges… 

How should compliance and legal teams react to the incident? Do external authorities need to be informed based on compromised data? Does the incident have a “material” impact that triggers urgent reporting requirements? What marketing & PR need to coordinate a response for affected end users? 

These questions shine a light on the critical gap between technical response teams and other departments within the organization. 

HTB’s Crisis Control solution bridges the vital gap between, technical, executive, and commercial teams to ensure actual preparedness. It’s not just about preparing internal teams to resolve a breach quickly, but training companies to interact with and involve internal and external bodies from media teams to regulatory authorities.

Turning chaos into interdepartmental coordination is key 

Thanks to a bespoke AI model that tracks, analyzes, and interprets public data related to incidents, facilitators can generate unlimited injects to customize crisis simulation scenarios. 

The flexibility to customize and expand narratives on the fly means simulations can be tailored to technologies, specific security concerns, or even collaboration between specific departments under pressure. 

This enables concerted efforts under chaotic conditions to become muscle memory at an organizational level. 

When dealing with a specific team, if you observe that participants are not fully engaged or performed poorly in the past—you can introduce more critical, high-stakes elements that are directly relevant to them, creating a heightened sense of urgency and realism. 

Consider a cybersecurity incident response team in a large healthcare organization. During a real-time Crisis Control simulation, the AI-driven exercise introduces an unexpected twist: 

The simulated breach involves patient data, which has strict regulatory requirements under HIPAA. The incident response team must immediately communicate closely with compliance and legal departments to assess if the breach triggers mandatory reporting timelines for healthcare data incidents.

As the simulation unfolds, the teams discover that specific regulations require notifying affected individuals within a 60-day window. 

However, a new state law—recently passed but not widely familiar—also demands additional reporting if more than 500 patients are affected, and within just 48 hours. 

The pressure escalates as this regulatory complexity is layered into the simulation, compelling the team to not only manage the technical containment of the breach but also ensure that legal and compliance departments are synchronized and aware of tight deadlines.

This scenario showcases how Crisis Control’s adaptable, realistic stress-testing exercises expose critical gaps. 

If the teams struggle to communicate efficiently, miss crucial deadlines, or fail to recognize these layered compliance issues, the simulation’s “golden report” underscores where processes or muscle memory need improvement. 

By using customizable simulations that mirror today’s current landscape, Crisis Control helps organizations not just react to incidents but manage the full scope of coordinating in high-stakes situations—bridging the gap between technical and non-technical teams.

A modern solution to measure & build readiness 

40% of CISOs & executives believe their organizations are not well prepared for today’s threat landscape. This lack of preparation paints a clear picture of the need for effective crisis simulations that take a threat-landscape-informed, collaborative approach to crisis planning across all levels. 

Traditional tabletop exercises, which have been a staple for crisis preparedness activity, are limited in their ability to meet modern demands. 

By testing preparedness with a gamified exercise like Crisis Control, organizations can learn what they need to do in a realistic, no-risk environment—and react better when real crises strike. 

The unified solution for modern crisis readiness

• Continuously benchmark and stress-test playbooks to identify further workforce development areas with clear insights, reporting, and next steps.

• Break collaboration silos. Bring together different teams, with diverse skills and objectives, all from different layers of the organization.

• Threat-connected-realism. Exercises are crafted using real-world scenarios, featuring live-fire attacks mapped to MITRE ATT&CK & NIST NICE.

• Dial up simulation intensity & specificity to increase the stakes for a specific department's processes, technologies, or security concerns. 

GET STARTED WITH CRISIS CONTROL