Every organisation rehearses fire drills without a second thought. When a real emergency hits, knowing what to do can prevent panic and a bad situation from becoming worse.
Yet when it comes to cyberattacks, many businesses have never rehearsed their response.
With the scale and sophistication of today’s attackers, unrehearsed recovery is a dangerous gamble.
In Australia, it’s a particularly perilous punt. Research from Rubrik Zero Labs found that Australian organisations experienced the highest proportion of ransomware attacks in the past 12 months at 35%. Of those organisations, 95% reported paying a ransom to recover data or stop an attack.
Why were these ransoms paid? Because cyber resilience was not practiced.
Fire drills build muscle memory and expose weaknesses in evacuation plans. Cyberattack drills reveal gaps in backup integrity, recovery plans, and incident response coordination.
Tabletop exercises and simulations help teams validate that data can be restored quickly, access controls hold under pressure, and business continuity plans function in real-world conditions.
Regularly running through scenario-based cyber drills strengthens organisational readiness, because in a world where attacks are inevitable, preparation is the only real defence.
Cyberthreats demand practice
Most organisations fail during a cyberattack not because they lack security. They fail because they never tested whether their security actually works under real-world conditions.
Attacks have evolved from opportunistic disruptions to deliberate business sabotage. Modern attackers don’t just encrypt data; they target backups, compromise credentials, disable security tools, and exploit implicit trust within networks. Their goal is to undermine your ability to recover and force you to pay their ransom.
Ransomware remains one of Australia’s most costly cyberthreats and traditional defences aren’t keeping pace. Recently, a major brewery revealed the personal details of 1.52 million customers might have been leaked in a September 29 ransomware attack.
As attackers increasingly exploit AI tools to increase the scale of their attacks and improve their success, resilience and recovery must be known quantities.
In fact, the threat itself is accelerating. The latest Rubrik Zero Labs research found nearly half of respondents expect agentic systems to drive the majority of attacks in the coming year, reflecting a broader shift in how adversaries operate. Autonomous systems compress timelines, scale attacks, and blur the line between insider risk and external compromise.
In such an environment, cyber drills are invaluable to avoid finding yourself in a position where giving in to the attackers’ demands is your only option.
Turning plans into preparedness
A tabletop simulation forces organisations to confront hard questions: How quickly can we detect and contain an attack? Can we confidently identify clean recovery points? Are our backups reliable? And, critically, can we rapidly restore systems?
In live exercises, assumptions are stress-tested. Teams uncover outdated credentials, undocumented dependencies, and bottlenecks that only emerge under pressure. These aren’t failures; they’re insights. Finding them in a controlled environment is preferable to discovering them during an attack.
Equally important is the human factor. Technology alone does not create resilience. Clear communication between IT, security, legal, executive leadership, and external partners determines how effectively an organisation responds.
Drills clarify roles, streamline decision-making, and eliminate ambiguity. They build the confidence that when an alert escalates into a crisis, the response is coordinated, not chaotic.
Boardrooms are increasingly asking a simple question: “If we are breached tomorrow, how long until we are fully operational?”
Too often, the answer is only theoretical.
True cyber maturity means being able to respond with tested metrics, proven recovery timelines, and documented evidence of resilience.
Fire drills do not prevent fires. They dramatically reduce the impact of a fire. Cyber drills serve the same purpose. When an incident occurs, the organisation can recover decisively, without panic, and without paying the ransom that attackers demand.
