Incident Planning
Build the Plan You'll Actually Execute When the AI-Era Incident Hits
Most organizations have an incident response plan. Far fewer have one that matches the incidents they're now likely to face. The plans on the shelf were written for ransomware that moved over hours, phishing that a careful employee could spot, and threat actors who left forensic artifacts in predictable places. They were not written for adversaries operating with AI-augmented tooling, attack timelines compressed from days to minutes, deepfake-driven executive impersonation, or incidents involving compromised AI agents and models.
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The result is a familiar pattern. The plan exists, but the playbooks are out of date. Roles are defined on paper, but the people in them have rotated. The communication tree assumes employees can verify a CEO request by voice, in a world where deepfake voice cloning has made that assumption unreliable. Cyber insurance carriers, regulators, and Boards now ask harder questions about plan currency and tested readiness, and "we have a plan" is no longer a sufficient answer.
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TBDCyber's Incident Planning service builds or modernizes the plan and playbooks you'll actually execute when the incident hits. We align to NIST SP 800-61, the CISA Incident Response Playbooks, and the controls expected by your cyber insurance carrier and regulators. We present incident scenarios that reflect today's threat landscape: AI-accelerated ransomware, business email compromise involving synthetic media, AI agent or model compromise, third-party AI vendor failure, and the fast-evolving regulatory disclosure requirements that follow each. And we stay engaged through testing and validation, because a plan that hasn't been exercised against a realistic scenario is still a hypothesis.
Our Approach
Needs Assessment
& Scenario Design
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Review the current incident response plan, playbooks, and supporting documentation against NIST SP 800-61, CISA guidance, and the requirements of your cyber insurance policy and applicable regulators (SEC, HHS, state breach notification, sector-specific authorities).
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Map your business and technical architecture, identifying crown-jewel systems, AI deployments (GenAI tools, AI agents, model APIs), critical third parties, and the "blast radius" if each is compromised.
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Develop a scenario library that reflects today's threat landscape: AI-accelerated ransomware, BEC with deepfake voice or video impersonation, prompt-injection-driven data exfiltration, AI agent compromise, malicious model behavior, third-party AI vendor breach, and regulatory disclosure events.
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Assess current incident response capabilities (people, process, technology, retainer coverage) and identify the specific gaps a real incident would expose.
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Review cyber insurance coverage in detail: notification timelines, panel-counsel and panel-vendor requirements, coverage exclusions, and the operational obligations the policy creates during an active incident.
Testing, Tabletop
& Validation
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Run scenario-based tabletop exercises tailored to your threat profile, including at least one AI-era scenario (deepfake CEO request, AI agent compromise, AI vendor breach, or AI-accelerated ransomware) per cycle.
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Facilitate executive-level tabletops separately from technical-team tabletops, because the decisions, time pressure, and information needs are different at each layer.
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Validate technical readiness: test backup and restore against ransomware scenarios, exercise out-of-band communications, walk through forensic evidence collection, and verify that playbook artifacts (contact lists, system inventories, vendor escalation paths) are current.
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Identify and document plan gaps surfaced by each exercise, with named owners, deadlines, and follow-up validation in the next cycle.
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Provide post-exercise reporting suitable for the Board, audit, and your cyber insurance carrier, demonstrating not just that the plan exists, but that it has been tested and improved.
Plan & Playbook
Development
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Build (or rebuild) the master Incident Response Plan with clear roles, decision rights, escalation criteria, and approval authority, and designed to hold up under the time pressure of an AI-accelerated incident.
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Develop scenario-specific playbooks for the incidents you're most likely to face, including ransomware, BEC, data breach, OT/ICS incident, AI agent or model compromise, and third-party / supply-chain incident.
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Build communication protocols that account for synthetic media risk: out-of-band verification procedures, defenses against executive impersonation, pre-drafted internal and external messaging, and a media/customer/regulator notification matrix.
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Define legal and regulatory notification protocols by jurisdiction and obligation type, with pre-mapped timelines and pre-identified counsel relationships, so the clock doesn't start while you're still figuring out who to call.
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Integrate the plan with adjacent disciplines (DR/BCP, vendor management, executive crisis communications, and HR) so the plan you execute is a single coordinated playbook, not five disconnected ones.
Continuous Improvement
& Integration
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Establish a plan maintenance cadence (typically a semi-annual review, an annual full refresh, plus ad hoc updates after material incidents, regulatory changes, or new AI deployments) so the plan never goes stale on the shelf.
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Define key performance indicators (time to detect, time to contain, time to notify, decision-cycle time) and key risk indicators that demonstrate program effectiveness over time.
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Integrate incident management with adjacent risk processes: vulnerability management, third-party risk, AI governance, change management, and threat intelligence, so the plan benefits from the full security program, not the IR team alone.
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Coordinate plan currency with your cyber insurance renewal cycle, ensuring the plan and your testing record support the strongest possible coverage and pricing position.
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Optional retained support between engagements: rapid scenario refresh after a significant industry incident, on-call advisory for plan-execution decisions, and surge support during a real incident.
Benefits
Plans That Match Today's Threats
Replace plans written for last decade with plans that account for AI-accelerated attack timelines, deepfake-driven social engineering, AI agent compromise, and the regulatory disclosure environment as it actually exists today.
Faster, Cleaner Decision Making Under Pressure
The minutes you save during an incident come from decisions you've already made on paper. We pre-decide the hard calls (escalation thresholds, notification triggers, containment authority, communications approval) so your team executes instead of debating.
Cross-Functional Readiness, Tested
A plan is only as strong as the people who execute it. Through scenario-based tabletop exercises at both executive and technical levels, we make sure the people in the seats know the plan, the room knows itself, and gaps are surfaced before an adversary surfaces them for you.
Audit, Regulatory & Insurance Confidence
Boards, auditors, regulators, and cyber insurance carriers are all asking tougher questions about the currency of IR plans and tested readiness. We deliver the documentation, evidence, and test records that turn those questions into a strong answer.
Resources and Insights
Related Services
When the incident is happening now, see Incident Emergency Response.
To validate that your overall resilience posture holds up across people, processes, and technology, see Cyber Resilience Review.
To ensure operations keep running through the incident, see DR & BCP Management.
To prepare your leadership team for the decisions an incident will demand, see Executive Incident Simulation.
Don't Wait for the Incident to Test the Plan
Your plan will be tested. The only choice is whether you test it on your terms, in a tabletop, with TBDCyber alongside you — or on the adversary's terms, at 2 a.m., in front of your Board and your customers.
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