– SECURITY CONTROLS VALIDATION
Gold Teaming
Gold Team Crisis Management Simulation That Prepares Leadership for the Moments That Matter Most.
Helping organizations prepare executive and operational leaders to manage major cyber incidents with clarity, coordination, and confidence. Eristotle’s Gold Team Exercise is a high-fidelity, scenario- based simulation that rehearses decision-making, communication, escalation, and recovery under live crisis conditions, ensuring your Crisis Management Team, SOC, and business leaders can respond decisively when real events strike, protecting operations, reputation, and long-term organizational resilience.
Prepare Leadership. Test Governance. Build Organizational Resilience.
A well-orchestrated response to a cyber crisis is not about guessing under pressure, it’s about practicing for impact. When a major breach, ransomware event, or regulatory disclosure strikes, the difference between contained damage and catastrophic fallout often comes down to how executives, leaders, and technical teams make decisions together under stress.
Eristotle’s Gold Team Exercise, also known as a Crisis Management Simulation, delivers a cross-functional rehearsal that simulates the pressures, ambiguity, and urgency of a live breach. Your executive and technical teams navigate a realistic cyber incident together, testing:
- Leadership agility under pressure
- Operational protocols and response playbooks
- Communication effectiveness across internal and external audiences
- Decision-making under incomplete and evolving information
- Coordination between business, security, legal, risk, and communications functions
Through this simulation, we challenge your organization’s ability to maintain business continuity, protect critical assets, and respond decisively amid chaos, building true organizational resilience, not just theoretical readiness.
Unlike a traditional tabletop, the Gold Team Exercise spans both technical incident handling (at the SOC, IR, and operational level) and strategic crisis management (at the executive, board, and communications level). It forces real-time coordination between these layers, exposing the weak links that only reveal themselves when the pressure is on.
Aligned to ISOBOK™ – A Consensus Driven Standard
ISOBOK™ is developed through a rigorous consensus-driven standards development process and incorporates the collective wisdom and experience of experts in the field from around the world. It defines the skills and knowledge required by ISO professionals.
- Contains a description of generally accepted practices for the establishment of Information Security Offices.
- Community driven and consensus based, continuously updated through iterations.
- Techniques are transferable with option to modify concepts and best practices for wide range of organizational contexts.
- Includes the highly valued Reporting Framework.
1. Security Leadership
- Defines the ISO’s role, competencies, and mindset, including the different types of ISOs.
- Establishes the security organisation’s structure, charter, and board-level mandate.
- Aligns with industry standards and frameworks to develop a comprehensive security strategy.
- Covers setting up budgets, initiating security programs, and embedding the function into enterprise governance.
2. Security Culture
- Emphasizes that humans are the final line of defense and central to effective security.
- Promotes a human-centric approach through awareness, training, and behavior-shaping initiatives.
- Uses phishing simulations, access hygiene practices, and continuous reinforcement to improve behaviors.
- Encourages a feedback-driven culture of continuous improvement and user engagement.
3. Security Governance
- Establishes governance through policies, frameworks, ISMS, and the 3 Lines of Defense model.
- Defines risk management approaches, including qualitative/quantitative methods, tolerance, and appetite.
- Integrates compliance, audit, and control mechanisms to align security and business risk.
- Addresses fraud prevention, governance councils, and harmonization between compliance and security.
4. Security Advisory
- Advises on security trends, frameworks, and standards, supporting strategic and operational decisions.
- Applies a layered defense model and reviews risks across technology domains.
- Offers guidance on integrating emerging technologies and securing IT/OT environments.
5. Security Operations
- Aligns security operations with business goals through a service-based SOC model.
- Plans and executes incident and crisis management using structured detection and response frameworks.
- Defines SOC team roles and leverages platforms like SIEM, SOAR, and threat intelligence tools.
6. Security Reporting
- Delivers tiered reporting for operational, management, and board-level audiences.
- Ensures regulatory, legal, and external stakeholder reporting meets compliance obligations.
- Uses KPIs, KRIs, dashboards, and threat intelligence to communicate performance and risk posture.
- Follows best practices for effective, actionable, and transparent security reporting.
Additionally, this servcie draws on AIBOK, CWBOK, and Eristotle competency frameworks for breadth and depth to ensure consistency, credibility, and transferability across engagements.
Key Objectives
- Evaluate the Crisis Management Team’s Response Capability
- Test the CMT’s ability to manage cyber incidents with reputational, legal, and financial impact
- Assess leadership agility, cohesion, and decision-making under pressure
- Benchmark performance against recognized crisis management frameworks
- Test Communication Flows Between Technical and Executive Teams
- Validate how information moves from SOC to IR to executive leadership
- Identify bottlenecks, distortions, and gaps in situational reporting
- Strengthen the link between technical detail and strategic decision-making
- Improve Situational Awareness and Decision-Making
- Build leadership capability for acting with incomplete, evolving information
- Stress-test escalation processes, thresholds, and authorities
- Enhance executive confidence in making rapid, high-stakes decisions
- Strengthen Cross-Functional Coordination
- Bring together business, IT, security, legal, risk, HR, and communications teams
- Align technical response with business continuity and operational priorities
- Break down silos and build shared crisis response muscle memory
- Validate Existing Incident Response and Recovery Frameworks
- Test playbooks, runbooks, and crisis plans against realistic pressure Identify gaps in policy, governance, and documented procedures Build confidence that existing frameworks work when they matter most
Business Outcomes & Benefits
- Improved Cross-Functional Crisis Coordination
- Align leadership, security, and operations to work as a unified response unit
- Reduce friction, confusion, and duplication during high-pressure events
- Build shared language, expectations, and decision-making frameworks
- Boardroom and Executive Readiness
- Enable senior leaders to rehearse their crisis roles in a safe environment
- Improve executive understanding of technical and operational incident impacts
- Empower leadership to lead from the front during real events
- Enhanced Legal, Regulatory, and PR Preparedness
- Practice stakeholder communication strategies under realistic pressure
- Rehearse media statements, regulatory notifications, and employee reassurance
- Strengthen engagement with customers, investors, insurers, and regulators
- Stress-Test of Escalation and Delegation Protocols
- Identify where roles are unclear or decision paths break down
- Expose gaps in authority, RACI, and escalation thresholds
- Fix structural issues before a real crisis amplifies them
- Organizational Insight From Scenario-Based Learning
- Build lasting awareness of business-critical asset dependencies
- Identify communication bottlenecks and recovery priorities
- Embed continuous improvement into leadership and operational teams
- Reduced Financial, Legal, and Reputational Impact
- Faster, better-coordinated responses reduce direct incident costs
- Stronger legal and regulatory defensibility through tested processes
- Protection of brand, trust, and long-term stakeholder confidence
- Regulatory and Assurance Value
- Demonstrable evidence of proactive crisis readiness
- Alignment with frameworks such as ISO 22301, NIST SP 800-34, DORA, NIS2, and sector-specific crisis management standards
- Stronger responses to audits, due diligence, and cyber insurance requirements
- Lasting Capability, Not Just a Point-in-Time Test
- Embedded playbooks, governance, and muscle memory across leadership teams
- Foundation for ongoing exercising and continuous crisis management maturity
- Sustainable uplift that grows with your business and threat landscape
Key Features
- Multi-Phase Simulation Design
- Technical incident handling phase (malware, C2 beaconing, lateral movement, ransomware, data exfiltration)
- Executive-level response, communication, and coordination phase
- Coordinated interaction between technical and strategic layers throughout the exercise
- Custom Scenario Engineering
- Simulated breach scenarios tailored to your threat landscape, industry, and internal structure
- Sector-specific storylines (finance, healthcare, public sector, critical infrastructure, tech)
- Integration of current threats, ransomware, supply chain, nation-state, insider, AI-enabled attacks
- Inject-Based Real-Time Adaptation
- Dynamically introduced developments to simulate new discoveries, reactions, or external pressures
- Media inquiries, regulator notifications, customer escalations, and social media incidents
- Legal, HR, and employee-related injects to test broader organizational impact
- Role-Specific Challenges
- Exercises designed for ISO, CIO, CEO, Legal Counsel, HR, Comms, COO, CFO, and other stakeholders
- Tailored dilemmas testing each role’s specific decisions and pressures
- Structured observation and feedback for each participant
- Operational Security (OPSEC) Awareness
- Simulation includes test communications using secure channels
- Mimics attacker disruption of standard tools (e.g., email, collaboration platforms)
- Reinforces out-of-band communication and continuity expectations
- Crisis Management Team (CMT) Integration
- Engagement of formal CMT roles, charters, and decision rights
- Testing of gold, silver, and bronze command structures
- Alignment with incident command systems and sector-specific governance models
- Cross-Functional Observation and Coaching
- Dedicated observers across technical, operational, and executive streams
- Real-time coaching and reflection to accelerate learning
- Structured feedback captured for reporting and follow-up
- Alignment With Industry Standards and Eristotle Frameworks
- Aligned with NIST SP 800-61, NIST SP 800-34, ISO 22301, ISO 27035, and sector-specific frameworks
- Grounded in ISOBOK™, CWBOK, and Eristotle competency frameworks
- Consistent, credible, and transferable approach across engagements
Deliverables
Deliverables
Depending on engagement scope, typical deliverables include:
Planning & Scenario Deliverables
- Pre-Simulation Planning & Scenario Brief
- Stakeholder interviews, threat landscape analysis, and custom storyline design
- Confirmation of objectives, participants, and logistics
- Scenario Design Pack
- Detailed storyline, injects, decision points, and evaluation criteria
- Facilitator and observer guides
Execution Deliverables
- Live Simulation Event
- Full-day exercise delivered virtually or onsite
- Includes both technical and executive engagement phases
- Facilitated by experienced crisis management and cyber leaders
- Real-Time Decision and Action Log
- Captured chronology of decisions, communications, and team actions
- Evidence base for later review, reporting, and improvement planning
Debrief & Review Deliverables
- Crisis Debrief Workshop
- Immediate post-event session to capture observations, lessons learned, and feedback
- Hot washup with all stakeholders
- Role-Specific Reflections
- Individual or functional debriefs for key participants (CMT, legal, comms, IR)
Reporting & Strategic Deliverables
- Detailed Report
- Timeline of actions, team responses, and communication effectiveness
- Escalation efficiency, decision logs, and performance analysis
- Observations across people, process, governance, and tooling
- Maturity Scorecard & Recommendations
- Evaluation of crisis management capability across key dimensions
- Prioritized next steps with effort, dependency, and investment guidance
- Executive Summary & Board Briefing
- Concise, visual summary for leadership and board audiences
- Strategic narrative on resilience, risk, and readiness
Enablement & Continuous Improvement Deliverables
- Crisis Playbook Enhancement Recommendations
- Specific improvements to CMT charters, escalation protocols, and playbooks
- Communication Template Pack
- Refined templates for internal, external, regulatory, and media communications
- Exercise Program Roadmap
- Recommended cadence and scenarios for ongoing simulation
- Handover & Enablement Pack
- Documentation, knowledge transfer, and transition support for internal teams
How We Deliver
Each simulation is carefully designed and delivered in phases, tailored to your organizational structure, regulatory context, sector, and maturity. We combine deep cyber and crisis management expertise with experienced facilitation to ensure every participant walks away with meaningful insight and uplift.
- Discovery & Planning
- Assessment of organizational context, recent threats, and readiness level
- Stakeholder interviews with executives, security leaders, and key functions
- Confirmation of scope, objectives, participants, and success criteria
- Scenario Engineering
- Design of realistic threat storylines including technical compromise, external pressure, and strategic dilemmas
- Development of injects, decision points, and role-specific challenges
- Alignment with business priorities, regulatory drivers, and real-world adversary behavior
- Pre-Exercise Briefings
- Orientation sessions for participants, facilitators, and observers
- Agreement on rules of engagement, safety, and logistics
- Distribution of pre-read materials and role cards as needed
- Live Facilitation
- Full simulation delivered across technical and business teams
- Dynamic injects, escalating complexity, and real-time inter-team coordination
- Observation, coaching, and reflection throughout the event
- Post-Simulation Review
- Facilitated structured debriefs with CMT, technical teams, and executive leaders
- Capture of self-evaluations, observations, and reflections
- Identification of key strengths, gaps, and improvement themes
- Strategic Recommendations
- Delivery of a detailed report mapping strengths, weaknesses, and improvement opportunities
- Prioritized recommendations across people, process, governance, and technology
- Executive presentation and board-ready narrative
- Continuous Improvement(optional)
- Recommended cadence for follow-up exercises and progression
- Integration with red team, blue team, and purple team engagements for broader maturity
- Pathway into related Eristotle services for sustained leadership and crisis readiness
Throughout the engagement, Eristotle works alongside your leaders with calm, experienced guidance and evidentiary rigor, ensuring that when the next real crisis arrives, your organization responds with clarity, control, and conviction.
Are You Ready for the Next Real Crisis?
Crisis is inevitable. Chaos isn’t. Partner with Eristotle to simulate the cyber crises that could define your organization, and build a leadership team ready to respond with clarity, coordination, and control. Book a free 30-minute discovery call with an Eristotle advisor to scope your Gold Team Crisis Management Simulation. No commitment required.