Realizing the Full Potential of Drill Mode in Crisis Simulator
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade or so, you already know cyber crises have become increasingly prevalent – posing significant threats to organizations worldwide. Organizations must continuously assess and improve their technical and non-technical teams’ knowledge, skills, and judgment to combat these challenges. This is where Immersive Labs’ Crisis Simulator comes into play. With single-player, drill, and presentation modes available, organizations can conduct team exercises that simulate real-world cyber crises in a number of different formats to prevent exercise fatigue. This allows organizations to create an exercising-first culture – as one tabletop exercise a year just isn’t enough. Let’s dig more into drill mode and learn how it helps users realize the true potential of cyber crisis planning. Crisis Simulator Drill Mode: What is it? Drill mode is a multiplayer crisis exercising format which allows participants to assume specific roles and tackle role-specific challenges. The goal is to strengthen their domain knowledge and develop muscle memory to more effectively deal with an actual crisis. A Crisis Sim administrator can assign clearly defined roles by aligning participants’ tasks with their actual job duties, ensuring the drills reflect real-life scenarios. Upon assignment, players receive notifications about their upcoming exercise, followed by a message signaling the start of their role-specific decision point or “inject.” Drill mode follows a sequential “pass the baton” style relay, allowing only one role to have an active task at any given time, with the completion of an active task triggering the next task. Some exercises may require players to complete multiple injects in succession, creating a cohesive and dynamic experience. Individual players’ decisions (good or bad) will significantly impact how the scenario unfolds for others, mimicking the interdependence and complexity of real crises. Benefits for Customers Drill mode was developed using direct customer feedback. Immersive Labs users were looking to exercise teams with role-relevant content to increase exercising engagement. With drill mode, and unlike competing solutions, participants aren’t expected to answer injects outside their area of expertise – ensuring a more focused and realistic experience. Drill mode’s emphasis on role-specific tasks promotes a more authentic depiction of how crisis responses really unfold. Recognizing no individual holds all decision-making power during a crisis, Drill mode reinforces collaboration and coordination among team members. Data gathered during a drill scenario allows teams to identify points of weakness and develop targeted training interventions. Drill mode also enables organizations to track the time needed for participants to complete each inject. This valuable metric provides insights into individual and team performance, giving organizations more data to refine their crisis response strategies and optimize resource allocation. Embracing Remote-First Work Environments With the proliferation of remote work, Crisis Simulator’s drill mode adapts nicely to evolving organizational needs. Players receive notifications and contribute when required. This remote-first approach enables seamless participation and ensures teams are well-prepared, regardless of geographical dispersion. Our micro-drills allow key contributors to allocate less than 10 minutes per decision point, significantly reducing their time commitment compared to traditional full-day drills. This efficient utilization of resources maximizes productivity and minimizes disruption to daily operations. Immersive Yourself Drill mode is a powerful feature within the Crisis Simulator that unleashes the true potential of cyber crisis planning. By assigning clearly defined roles to participants, organizations can conduct team exercises where each player assumes their actual job role in completing an assigned task. With a strategic and measurable approach to cyber crisis preparedness, Crisis Simulation with drill mode identifies weaknesses and promotes collaboration among team members. With the ability to track inject completion time, adapt to remote work environments, and offer versatile scenario options, drill mode empowers organizations to build greater resilience in the face of cyber threats.A Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting Your Own Hacktober Event
Organizing engaging, informative, and enjoyable cybersecurity events like Swisscom's Hacktober event doesn't have to be daunting. With strategic groundwork and relevant, interactive challenges, you can create a cybersecurity event that is both fun and educational. Are you considering hosting a similar cybersecurity event? This blog provides a step-by-step guide to creating an impactful event, resulting in a more skilled and prepared workforce.Feature Focus: Introducing the AI Scenario Generator
In this blog, we’ll cover what this feature is and how you can use it. For this release, we’ve made creation as easy as possible. Just click Create with AI, add a title, and select options for organisational sector, attack vector, threat actor, and scenario size. This will generate a full scenario, from the briefing to the epilogue. You can even make a cuppa while it works!🪄✨ Once created, these scenarios can be published or edited and published in your organisation's catalogue. But how exactly does it work? Organisation admins can turn the AI Scenario Generator on and off in the platform settings area, so you’ll need this to be turned on if you want to try it out! Our AI Scenario Generator is currently only available to our Cyber Crisis Simulator customers. It’s based on technology provided by OpenAI, with generations based on publicly available data related to crisis management as well as our own Immersive Labs Crisis Sim catalogue. Organisation admins can choose to use the feature in a layered approach: No AI access at all: This means that your organisation has chosen not to enable the AI Scenario Generator. Without scenario sharing enabled: You can generate AI scenarios based only on the inputs shown in the generation box. With scenario sharing enabled: The AI will access specific parts of your previously published scenarios when generating new ones, ensuring the new scenario is highly relevant to your context. These settings can be updated on the organisation's settings page. If you’re keen to use the AI Scenario Generator but it’s not enabled in your organisation, you’ll need to discuss this with your internal Organization Administrator. If you’re an Organization Administrator and want to know more about the feature, contact your CSM. Tell me more about scenario sharing! If your organisation chooses to also enable scenario sharing, Immersive Labs will include specific information from any previous custom scenarios that you’ve published in the temporary “context window” for requests to our third-party AI vendor. A "context window" is an extension of the query sent to an AI model. It exists only during the processing of the query and isn’t saved by any third parties. The third-party AI vendor won’t use any of the information you share to train its models. Shared data will only ever be included in this temporary "context window" of generation and won’t be stored by the third-party AI vendor. The shared information includes scenario titles, descriptions, inject titles, and response options. It excludes feedback to response options, exercise information, reporting, account or organisation information fields, or metadata. Scenario sharing is designed to make the generated scenario more relevant to your particular context. You can still create scenarios using AI without scenario sharing, but your scenario will likely be more generic and less relevant to your particular organisational context. However, you can still edit the final version to make it more relevant to you – just like with our catalogue scenarios. Let’s not forget the human in the loop As with all things AI, we recommend that you review the AI output before publishing your scenario, to ensure it meets your needs. The AI Scenario Generator currently only generates text content, so you’ll probably want to add additional rich media, such as images or videos, to your scenario. To get the most out of your crisis simulation, we also recommend enabling, adding, changing, and checking certain elements. These include: Checking that you’re happy with the text formatting and narrative content Checking that you’re satisfied with the role listed Enabling and adding response feedback or performance indicators If you want to capture ranked response data, select the ranked options setting and add a rank (great, good, weak, okay) to each response option to suit your organisation's preferred situational response Turning on response confidence or justifications Get involved and share your thoughts! We know that AI is a hot topic and we’re keen to hear and capture your feedback and suggestions on this first release of our AI Scenario Generator as part of our user research taking place this November and December. If you want to participate in this research, you’ll be able to share your thoughts and experiences of using our AI tool and scenario creation more generally directly with our team. Comment below if you’d like to find out more, and we’ll contact you with further details! If you’re an Immersive Labs customer, you can find out more about the AI Scenario Generator in our FAQ guide.When the Lights Went Out at Heathrow: A Crisis That Was Never Meant to Be “Won”
In the early hours of March 21, 2025, a fire broke out at the North Hyde electrical substation in West London, just a few miles from Heathrow Airport. Within hours, a local infrastructure incident had triggered widespread disruption across the global aviation ecosystem. Flights were grounded, operations were halted, passengers were stranded, and local residents were left without power. Suddenly, one of the most connected airports in the world found itself completely disconnected. This wasn’t just a power failure, it was a systems failure. The fire itself was severe yet containable, but what unfolded afterward exposed far deeper vulnerabilities. It has since been claimed that Heathrow had “enough power” from other substations, which now raises difficult but fair questions: If there was enough power, why shut the airport down completely? If there wasn’t, why wasn’t the site resilient enough to handle a failure like this? And most importantly, how did one single point of failure have this much impact on such a critical national and international asset? These are the questions that will dominate the post-crisis scrutiny, but while many rush to applaud or condemn, I think the truth lies somewhere more uncomfortable. Crisis leadership isn’t about perfect outcomes Crisis response is never clean. It’s messy, fast-moving and incomplete. You make decisions with partial data, under pressure, in real time. And in the majority of cases, you choose between bad and worse – which is exactly what Heathrow’s leadership team faced: Compromised infrastructure Uncertainty about the integrity of power and systems Thousands of passengers on site and mid-flight en route to the airport Global operations and supply chain at risk The common response is, “we need to tackle all of these problems” – and rightly so – but what people often forget is that in a crisis, you don’t have the resources, time, or information to tackle everything at once. Heathrow's leadership chose safety and containment, and in just under 24 hours, they were back online again. That’s impressive. That’s recovery under pressure, and that’s business continuity in action. But it doesn’t mean everything was done right, and it certainly doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask hard questions. “Enough power” means nothing without operational continuity Having backup power doesn’t mean having functional operations. Power alone doesn’t run an airport – systems, processes, and people do. If the backup didn’t maintain critical systems like baggage handling, communications, lighting, or security, then the airport was right to shut down. However, the next question is, why didn’t those systems have their own layers of protection, and where was the true resilience? This leads us to the real issue: this wasn’t just about Heathrow, it was about the entire ecosystem. Resilience isn’t just a plan – it’s a whole system of dependencies The recent disruption is a real reminder that resilience doesn’t just live inside an organization. It lives across every partner, vendor, and hidden dependency. In critical services like aviation, the biggest vulnerabilities are often outside the walls of your own operation. There’s a web of partners involved in keeping an airport running: Power providers Facilities management IT and communications vendors Outsourced security Maintenance crews Air traffic systems Second and third-tier subcontractors Many of these providers sit outside the organization’s direct control, yet their failures become your crisis in an instant. True resilience requires more than internal readiness, it demands visibility across the whole supply and vendor chain, coordination protocols with external stakeholders, and clear ownership of critical functions. When something breaks in the background, you won’t have time to figure out who’s responsible; you’ll only care about who can fix it. So identifying and (most importantly) testing and exercising your supply chain is paramount. This wasn’t a “winnable” crisis – and that’s the point I’ll discuss this concept further in my upcoming webinar, The Unwinnable Crisis: How to Create Exercises That Prepare Teams for Real-World Uncertainty, but the Heathrow disruption is a perfect case study. This was never going to be a clean “win.” No plan could have delivered a flawless response, and no leader could have avoided disruption entirely. Instead, this crisis asked a different question: When everything seems to be falling apart, can you contain the damage, protect your people, and recover quickly? That’s the real test. It’s what separates the theoretical resilience plans from the operational reality. Heathrow passed parts of that test, but the system around it has questions to answer, and every other organization watching should be asking the same thing: “How many hidden dependencies are we one substation, one outage, one contractor failure away from exposing?” The next crisis may not give you a warning, and it certainly won’t give you time to figure out who’s holding it all together. Crisis leadership isn’t about perfection; it’s about being ready for the moment when no perfect option exists. The question now is, what did it reveal that we can’t afford to ignore? Ready to prepare for true crisis readiness? Join me for the upcoming community webinar, The Unwinnable Crisis: How to Create Exercises That Prepare Teams for Real-World Uncertainty on April 11. We’ll explore what true crisis readiness looks like and how you prepare your team to lead when there is no “win” – only choices.Pieces of the Puzzle – The Power of Interconnected Cyber Drills
A crisis doesn’t respect boundaries – it unfolds in real time, demanding responses from every level, from technical teams to executives. That’s exactly what we set out to simulate with our recent cyber drill, “Pieces of the Puzzle”, a high-intensity exercise that pushed over 300 team members into the deep end of crisis response. What set this drill apart was its interconnectivity – no single person had the full picture, and every decision mattered. A crisis unfolds in pieces The exercise was built around two fictional companies: FusionArc – A cloud-based IT infrastructure provider suffering a cyberattack Orchid Logistics – A global supply chain company, FusionArc’s largest customer, facing operational chaos due to the breach. Day one simulated a cyberattack on FusionArc Solutions, with participants acting as the incident response team investigating and responding to a breach of critical systems and sensitive data. This day showcased Immersive’s cyber range capabilities and the importance of continuous upskilling. It allowed participants to practice incident response protocols and sharpen their ability to detect, analyze, and respond to cyber threats. Live technical demos showcase real-time analysis and response, bringing the simulation to life and highlighting the skills needed to combat cyberattacks. Day two shifted the perspective to Orchid Logistics, whose global operations across four major regions were thrown into turmoil due to the cascading impact of the attack. Each region had its own challenges, from disrupted healthcare supply chains in Europe to financial uncertainty in North America. Different teams’ operations, legal, communications, finance, and crisis management were forced to make critical decisions with incomplete and often conflicting information. This wasn’t just about testing individual teams. It was about stress-testing the connections between them because, in a crisis, decisions have consequences. Every action (or inaction) ripples outward, shaping how an incident unfolds and determining the effectiveness of the response. The design: controlled chaos with a purpose Running a cyber drill at this scale required intricate planning. Each element was carefully orchestrated to simulate the real-life confusion of a crisis where information is fragmented, priorities clash, and leaders must make tough choices under pressure. Key elements included: Dynamic information flow – Teams received updates in real-time, with technical teams feeding insights to crisis managers, who in turn had to make strategic decisions for the business. Regional decision-making – Each region had its own crisis management team (CMT), responsible for navigating localized challenges while staying aligned with global headquarters. Cross-functional dependencies – Operations, legal, finance, and public relations all faced their own unique crises relating to the cyberattack, as well as other unrelated business continuity disruptions. Their ability to coordinate responses mirrored the true complexity of a global business disruption. Escalating pressure – Timed injects (new crisis updates), roaming media roleplayers, and breaking news images forced participants to adapt rapidly, just as they would in a real cyber event. By layering these complexities, the exercise tested technical incident response and the entire organization’s ability to work as a single unit under duress. We looked at disaster recovery, crisis management, and business continuity all in the same cyber drill. The power of perspective (or lack of it) A key takeaway from the drill was how overwhelming it felt. No one had the full picture – teams made decisions with only their slice of the crisis, just like in the real world. We saw participants grappling with conflicting information, wondering why other teams weren’t responding as expected. Some felt completely isolated until they realized that the missing information was sitting with another team in another region, experiencing a completely different part of the crisis. This is why interconnected drills are vital. They teach organizations to connect the dots and reinforce a crucial lesson: in high-stakes environments, every decision shapes the crisis’s trajectory. Prove and improve: the true value of cyber drills Cyber drills aren’t just theoretical exercises. They test response plans, communication, and decision-making under pressure while revealing areas for improvement. This drill pushed participants to work under stress and exposed gaps not just in technical response, but in collaboration, escalation, and decision-making. These exercises matter because they don’t just reveal weaknesses – they build resilience before a real crisis strikes. What this means for your organization Cyber threats affect entire businesses – customers, partners, supply chains, and finances. The biggest risk isn’t the attack itself but poor coordination in the response. That’s why cross-team exercises are vital: technical teams must know how and when to escalate, crisis managers must grasp the stakes, and executives must make quick decisions with limited information. Cyber drills don’t always have to be this large, but they must be realistic. Even smaller exercises focused on decision-making across teams can expose gaps in communication and preparedness before a real crisis does. Final thoughts: crisis readiness is built, not assumed In the debrief of Pieces of the Puzzle, one theme emerged repeatedly: we are only as strong as our connections. The most prepared organizations aren’t just those with the best tools or plans – they’re the ones who practice together and strengthen the human elements. Cyber drills push teams to break silos, act under pressure, and manage uncertainty. If you’re not running them regularly, the question isn’t if you’ll struggle in a crisis – it’s when. No matter your industry, scale, or risk landscape, the key takeaway is this: crisis preparedness isn’t just about reacting – it’s about ensuring every piece of the puzzle fits before the crisis hits. Are your teams ready to prove and improve? Share your thoughts Has this inspired you to plan a drill? Do you have any questions about planning or execution and need some pointers? Have you run a drill or been to a drill event, and if so, how did it feel? I’d love to hear from you and help you reach your goals.Experience-Driven and Intrinsic Learning in Cybersecurity
Experience-driven learning Experience-driven learning can take many forms, including: Practical simulations Role-playing exercises Individual hands-on learning Team-based exercising For example, some employees may be presented with micro exercises that pivot around key risk areas such as device security, data handling or social engineering. Others may participate in a tabletop exercise that simulates a ransomware attack, allowing them to practice incident response, crisis management, and recovery procedures in a safe and engaging environment. More technical teams can experience a real attack on real infrastructure in a cyber range, working together to identify and understand the attack using defensive and forensic tools. These types of activities foster intrinsic learning, driven by personal interest and the desire for self-improvement rather than external rewards like grades or promotions. These types of activities also engage natural human behaviours related to gamified learning, both individually and as a team. Intrinsic learning Intrinsic learning can be particularly valuable, especially in the context of cybersecurity, because it allows employees to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of the subject matter beyond what is required for their job. This approach to learning is not only more engaging and effective but also helps organizations identify areas for improvement and potential vulnerabilities. Intrinsic learning can also help foster a culture of continuous learning within the workforce. By encouraging employees to pursue their interests and explore new areas of cybersecurity, organizations can create an environment where individuals feel empowered to take ownership of their learning and seek out new opportunities for growth and development. To make your cybersecurity training more experiential and foster intrinsic motivation for learning, consider the following steps: Align with personal goals Empower team members to align upskilling pathways with their career aspirations and professional development. Emphasize real-world relevance Showcase how the skills learned directly apply to current cybersecurity challenges and job responsibilities. Provide autonomy Allow learners to freely explore different topics and skills. Create a supportive environment Encourage peer-to-peer learning and mentorship opportunities to build a culture of continuous improvement. Celebrate progress Recognize and highlight individual and team achievements to boost confidence and motivation. Implement adaptive challenges Gradually increase difficulty levels, ensuring learners are consistently challenged but not overwhelmed - the right level of learning is more important than the quantity. Encourage reflection Prompt learners to analyse their performance after each exercise, especially team-based, fostering a growth mindset and self-awareness. Facilitate knowledge sharing Organize regular debriefing sessions where individuals can discuss their experiences and insights gained from the training. Connect to organizational impact Demonstrate how improved cybersecurity skills contribute to the overall success and resilience of the organization. Provide immediate feedback Leverage Immersive Labs' real-time feedback mechanisms to help individuals understand their progress and areas for improvement. By implementing these steps, you can create a more engaging and intrinsically motivating cybersecurity training experience, fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development within your organization. Conclusion Incorporating intrinsic and experience-driven exercises into your cyber resilience strategy can be an effective way of measuring and improving your overall resilience. Today, the need to exercise effectively has become a key feature of many cyber security frameworks and directives such as ISO27001, NIS2 and DORA, requiring organisations to maintain proof with policies and procedures underpinned by data and results. What have you experienced in your own upskilling journeys to get you where you are today, have you found some ways work better than others; Individual, team, hands-on, theory, classroom? What are your favourite ways to learn and stay motivated with the ever-changing cyber landscape right now? Share your stories and insights in the comments below!Mastering Crisis Sim: 5 Tips for Easy Customization
Drawing on three years of Crisis Sim experience, I’ve identified five essential elements that consistently lead to successful custom simulations. 1. Have a good plan Having a plan is vital to dealing with a crisis, and the same thing goes for creating a Crisis Sim. When planning a crisis scenario, it can be extremely helpful to have a general outline of the storyline, different branches, and specific IR goals to hit before creation begins. This can be done in many different ways, depending on your preference. A whiteboard session, document outline, Figma, or even pen and paper can help outline different injects, attack vectors, and responses. 2. Use naming conventions to keep things organized When creating a multi-branch exercise, injects can often be reused or slightly modified to engage users and reflect the impact of their previous choices. However, with multiple copies of injects, it can be difficult to track which inject links to which option or how it flows into other branches. Organizations have found that using simple naming conventions greatly reduces confusion. For example, including the inject number and different branches ([Inject], [Branch]) provides a clear visual and numerical reference. This approach is especially helpful when managing copied injects with identical titles. 3. Create useful attachments Crisis Sims and tabletops are all about engaging the audience and immersing them in the scenario. Adding useful attachments can significantly enhance realism with minimal effort. Attachments in injects provide context, information, or illustrate the effects of previous decisions. Organizations often use sanitized SOC screenshots, short videos featuring leaders, or their IR playbook to drive engagement. With support for various file types, these additions make scenarios more interactive and realistic. 4. Flexible interludes Interludes are a new type of inject in Crisis Sim that don’t require action or voting from participants, offering versatile use cases. Interludes can be used to bring the audience back to the main branch if they begin to choose options that aren’t in line with playbooks, framing it as a decision made by a manager or leader. Interludes can also be used as a conversation starter rather than relying on voting, as conversation is key during crisis exercises. Instead of listing a few options, interludes can allow for open-ended questions, which lead to discussions on the best next steps or things to consider as the scenario progresses. Interludes can also introduce new issues and provide more context. 5. ‘Create with AI’ to get started ‘Create with AI’ is a new feature in Crisis Sim that allows organizations to create customized scenarios with artificial intelligence. This feature is great at getting a highly customized scenario started, all within a few minutes. When using ‘Create with AI’, it’s vital to provide as much information within the title as you can. Giving more information within the prompt will lead to a better scenario. Additionally, AI is still growing and improving, so take a deep look at the scenario after creation and make alterations where needed. Share your thoughts Have you got any top tips for customizing Crisis Sims? Comment below and share them with The Human Connection Community!
