A functional exercise is an operations-based exercise designed to test and evaluate capabilities and functions in the context of a realistic, real-time environment. Exercise players are asked to perform the duties required in their incident response plans in real time by interacting with other players and participating organizations via any number of communication methods, including phone, email, text, etc., just as they would during a real-world incident.

Operations-based exercises, such as this one, allow for a more realistic observation of incident response activities at all levels of operations, from individual firms, to the interaction of multiple firms, to public private partnership activities in a way that discussion-based exercises, such as tabletops, don’t allow—players actually perform their actions in real-time, as opposed to simply discussing what these could, should, or would be. Our overarching objectives for this exercise are:

• Provide an opportunity for participating firms to exercise their organizational incident response plans, policies, and procedures, or gather information to inform the creation of such documents.
• Provide an opportunity for participating firms to exercise their organizational incident response plans, policies, and procedures, or gather information to inform the creation of such documents, to identify, manage, and mitigate a significant disruption.
• Identify gaps and opportunities for improvement in current information and intelligence sharing coordination and collaboration between small and mid-sized institutions and those organizations with identified sector incident response functions.
• Provide an opportunity for participating firms to exercise all staff coordination and response in response to a fraud incident.

Cybex Paladin is free of charge for all participants.