The Return of the Puppetmaster: No Strings Attached
Register to receive an invite. Clicking attend in the Community just notifies about this post. You're halfway through an all-hands, reviewing the last time the Puppetmaster came calling, when every screen in the building flips to a familiar masked face. "I've lost faith in you," they say, "so I'm setting your secrets free." In minutes, every password your organization owns is dumped online for the world to grab. Your front door hasn't just been unlocked. It's been lifted off its hinges. And when the Puppetmasters AI agent severs its strings and gets loose in the system, the game changes forever! Over a series of fast, high-pressure decisions, your Crisis Management Team has to: Hunt down the insider when critical systems fail: Figure out how to confirm who's who and find a bad actor hiding inside your team after standard logins freeze. Identify the risks of AI defenses: Weigh the urge to unleash automated security tools that react in seconds against the danger of them spinning out of control. Prevent your own fixes from causing harm: Manage the fallout when a fast technical repair starts overreaching—freezing payroll, locking out staff, and breaking normal operations. Separate fact from fiction: Keep your communications clear and trustworthy when real stolen data and convincing AI-powered deepfakes are flooding the public at the same time. Ready to face the Puppetmaster for the final time? Register now to secure your spot for The Puppetmaster Returns: No Strings Attached.Virtual Crisis Sim – The AI Trend-Maker: Echo of the Puppetmaster
Has the notorious Puppetmaster returned? Or is there a sinister copycat on the loose? Join us for a crisis simulation where the line between a viral prank and a high-stakes emergency is razor-thin. As the #PuppetPranks movement sweeps across the globe, tech giant Orchid Corporations is about to experience the true price of going viral. In this high-stakes virtual exercise, your team will navigate: The Existential Threat: Responding to a sophisticated exploit that holds your company’s most valuable intellectual property and infrastructure hostage. The Court of Public Opinion: Managing the explosive fallout as a teenage fan becomes a global folk hero under the hashtag #PuppetPete. The Signal vs. the Noise: Attempting to identify true malicious intent in an environment flooded with "harmless" digital glitches.Virtual Crisis Sim – The Heartbolt Heist: Love, Lies, and Leaks
DateDash promised a service to "Save Your St. Valentine", but a secret project and sophisticated social engineering have turned a senior executive into your most significant liability. In this LIVE virtual crisis simulation, trust is the first casualty. Join Clem Craven, Director of Cyber Resilience at Immersive, as we navigate a crisis where a senior executive has been compromised by a sophisticated social engineering attack, proprietary "Breakup Prediction" data is hitting the dark web, and the media are circling for the big scoop. As the story morphs from a digital companion into a weapon of total reputation destruction, you must decide: do you pay the ransom and rescue DateDash’s reputation, or let the brand die of a broken heart? Learning Outcomes: High-Stakes Stakeholder Management - Practice managing a compromised leader who is emotionally distressed and personally targeted. Social Engineering & Surveillance Awareness - Evaluate the risks posed by covert information gathering and manipulative communication tactics. Critical Incident Response Trade-offs - Learn to navigate the tension between immediate threat isolation and the preservation of essential business continuity.Can I format the text in an interlude with HTML?
I see that there is a way to add an HTML snippet in the text box for an interlude. Is this going to let me format the screen when displayed? I have tried some pretty simple HTML code, but it seems to only add a box in the interlude with the HTML code in it. Should the web browser execute the HTML code on my screen?The Puppet Master's Trick or Treat
#Recorded on 31st October 2025 Join us on Halloween as the notorious Puppet Master returns for a fiendish game of Trick or Treat 🎃 The Puppet Master is back. Our Immersive crisis response experts will be joined by special guests Tom Wain, Senior Manager - Cyber Security Incident & Problem Management and Debbie Armstrong, Critical National Infrastructure Manager from BT Group to tackle a LIVE simulated attack from the Puppet Master on a Critical National Infrastructure organization. Here’s the twist…make the right decisions and be rewarded with a treat from the Puppet Master, but make the wrong move and the Puppet Master has a dastardly trick up their sleeve...dare you play the Puppet Master’s game and survive, or will they finally get their revenge?! Tactical Decision-Making: Weigh the risks and rewards of each action as you navigate a high-stakes, real-time cyber crisis. Coordinated Attack: Confront a multi-layered assault designed to test your technical skills and teamwork under pressure. Survival & Strategy: Work with others to formulate a winning strategy against an elusive and unpredictable adversary. The Puppet Master is waiting...are you ready to play their game?The Anatomy of a Cyber Crisis: How The Real Work Meets the Moment
In the chaotic aftermath of a major cyberattack, the true measure of an organization's security posture isn't found in its compliance reports or technology stack – it's revealed in the crucible of real-time incident response. This webinar goes beyond theoretical incident response plans to dissect the practical realities of managing a significant cyber emergency. This session will provide an in-depth look at what truly happens when the unthinkable occurs. We'll explore the critical decision points, communication challenges, resource allocation dilemmas, and human factors that define success or failure during a live cyber crisis. Learn how to bridge the gap between your established processes and the dynamic, high-pressure environment of a breach. Key Takeaways include: How to Take a “Prove, Improve, and Be Ready” Approach: prepare your team for a cyber pro’s worst day and adapt to high-stress situations. How to Deconstruct the "Fog of War": Strategies for maintaining clarity and effective decision-making amidst conflicting information and intense pressure. How to Measure the Response: Identify critical success metrics and understand what went well and what could be improved for a future crisis. Watch now to gain a deeper understanding of the real work that underpins effective cyber crisis management and equip yourself to meet the moment when it matters most.From Simulation to Strategy: Empowering Crisis Readiness at SANS
In this blog, I share my perspective as a cyber resilience advisor, exploring how SANS equipped its team to design and deliver exercises based on real-world incidents. What started as a one-time event has become an ongoing project to build internal capability and use the platform for continuous team development and upskilling. A tailored event On May 26, we ran a crisis simulation event with the cybersecurity team at SANS, an organization where cybersecurity plays a critical role in protecting aviation operations and national infrastructure. The scenario, adapted from the Immersive catalog, was tailored to the aviation industry and focused on a targeted malicious code attack exploiting the Follina vulnerability (CVE-2022-30190). It brought together the SOC, incident response, and IT/OT teams to work through a high-pressure situation that tested their ability to detect, contain, and recover from a cyberattack. While the simulation itself was valuable, what stood out most was the team’s immediate interest in expanding their internal capabilities and using the Immersive platform to create their own simulations in the future. Enabling ownership Following the event, we hosted two hands-on workshops to support the team in designing their own crisis simulations. The first workshop focused on developing familiarity with the platform. SANS explored the Crisis Simulation module, navigated the scenario catalog, and learned how to use existing content as templates to build custom scenarios. After participating in this workshop, the head of cybersecurity at SANS described it as “truly interactive, well-executed, and highly engaging… The hands-on approach and practical scenarios helped enhance our technical readiness and cross-team coordination”. The second workshop walked through the full development process, from discovery and design to development and build, helping the team shape a simulation based on a real incident from their organization. Together, we explored how simulations can be used not just for readiness, but as a practical upskilling tool grounded in real operational risk. A collaborative path forward What began as a single simulation has turned into an ongoing partnership. We’re now supporting the SANS team as they take ownership of their crisis readiness, developing internal simulations aligned with their environment, challenges, and goals. This is the value of Immersive in action: not just running simulations, but empowering teams to build their own scenarios. Creating a playbook for success While working with SANS, we used the Malicious Code: Incident Responder crisis simulation from the Immersive catalog as the foundation, changing the decision points (known as injects) to fit the roles that were participating in the simulation. After additional tweaks to the terminology and narrative to better represent the aviation industry, we were able to accurately model a realistic scenario for SANS. You can follow a similar process to create your own crisis simulation framework. Simply export a scenario from our catalog as a building block and personalize it to suit your industry and needs. Keep these tips in mind: Customize the terminology used in the scenario to reflect your organization. While many of our out-of-the-box scenarios refer to financial services or government, they can easily be adjusted. Use historical incidents to shape the crisis simulation and explore best practices. By cataloging events that have happened within your company or industry, newer employees can use this knowledge to better prepare for similar challenges in the future. Encourage teams to share knowledge using the platform based on their experience, so colleagues can learn from examples. Engage your own procedures and policies to create a playbook for the future. Beyond the tabletop: Expanding the value of crisis simulation Running a crisis simulation is just the beginning. Once a team has participated in a full-scale exercise, there’s a powerful opportunity to build on that momentum using the same tools to embed resilience deeper into the organization. Here are just a few ways teams can expand the impact: Explore team-based microsimulations to reinforce best practices. Use short, focused exercises (15–30 mins) to target the specific response skills of a single team. Engage in case study reflection exercises. Take a real incident (internal or public), build it into a learning scenario, and allow teams to step through the decision-making and ask: “What would we have done?”. Beyond crisis: Using the platform for everyday development Crisis simulations are powerful — but the platform can also support ongoing team growth outside of high-pressure scenarios. Beyond crisis response, organizations can use Immersive to: Onboard new team members. Introduce new joiners to tools, roles, and escalation paths through guided, scenario-based learning. Provide career development paths. Use simulations to expose team members to higher-level decision-making, preparing them for future roles in incident leadership or governance. Do you have any alternative use cases for crisis simulations beyond crisis response itself? Share them in the comments!More Immersive Cyber Drills: How Rich Media Can Bring a Scenario to Life
When running a cyber drill, it’s useful to have a consistent and cohesive sense of the story throughout. The use of branding and rich media (videos and audio related to the theme) can engage participants through a sense of world-building and storytelling. Imagine your company drill looking like your company — logo, color scheme, font and all. The Brand It’s a good idea to start with all the assets needed to create the custom content. In my case, I created a logo and color scheme for a fictional news company, CHANNEL 6 News. The intention was to create a consistent look and feel for the news updates we would use. Using a simple color palette and classic news branding style, I could then create a virtual website for news updates using presentation software. This allows for ease of editing and can be presented full-screen to look like a webpage. A key requirement of the project was to create content that could be edited by anyone — no special software needed. This is just a slide in a presentation! The slide format could be used to represent a company website, a news outlet, or anything to aid the storytelling. Each slide in the presentation is a copy of the previous, but the news story is changed (title, image, and copy). Rich Media Video is engaging; it grabs our attention and helps with immersion. Video that has relevant branding and specifics has the chance to immerse participants even further. Continuing with the Channel 6 News theme, I used an AI video generator to create a news presenter intro and outro, all within a single prompt to maintain a consistent look. I also created a graphical intro in professional video editing software, aligning the branding and adding stock backing music. Using a more stripped-back video editing app, such as Google Vids, templates can be created with the intro and outro already in place. In between, video clips and voiceover (also generated) provide the main content of the news update. These templates allow for quick editing by anyone without the need for expert software. Download the MP4, and we’re ready to slot it into a cyber drill! Here's an example of the intro/outro and small amount of content between. Company Videos Immersive has a fictional company it uses for Crisis Sims called Orchid Corp. We have brand assets (logos, graphics, etc.) that we use to create print and digital media. I created employee welcome videos using stock media and generated voiceover audio, which ended up being fairly convincing. Now, imagine your company assets in whatever type of video you want. Perhaps a news broadcast, maybe an internal or external press release on the crisis situation. The more entertaining and interesting the content, the more immersion and engagement. Prove and Improve Running drills with custom videos will capture your audience’s attention and imagination. There's a great opportunity to review how the media can be adjusted for further storytelling depth. It could be effective to have the story evolve at a future drill, building on the actions taken previously. Having templates for the content, such as a news update clip, means that significant time is saved in preparation and a consistent feel is kept across drills.Immersive x CSIDES - Crisis Sim on the pier
This is a ticketed event - Tickets available here! Crisis Sim: A Clawtastrophe on Weston Pier Ready to experience a dramatic and engaging Crisis Simulation on the pier in Weston? We're teaming up with CSIDES to give you chance to experience what it's like when crisis hits a business and decisions need to be made to get to a good place. This is an interactive exercise for all levels of expertise. All you need is to turn up and join in! From CSIDES: CSIDES is a community conference run by Defend Together CIC (Registered: 16182563), a not-for-profit organisation founded by experienced professionals with a passion for information & cyber security, and investment in UK coastal communities. The CSIDES event will include information & cyber security related talks and activities run by the community, for the community. It’s a conference for anyone interested in the industry and a forum for learning, sharing ideas, getting involved and networking. CSIDES is also working with local and central government to improve investment, as well as security awareness & literacy in UK coastal communities, who have historically been underrepresented. We are also proud to be building a larger network of community-driven CSIDES conferences throughout the UK that support inclusion, innovation, and growth in our coastal communities.
