A leading healthcare technology company partnered with Bryghtpath to design and facilitate a tabletop exercise pressure-testing its response to an AI-accelerated vulnerability storm, exercising the technical teams that would carry the response before facing the threat for real.
The Opportunity
AI models can now discover software vulnerabilities and chain them into working attacks, collapsing exploitation timelines from weeks to hours. The company’s security leadership recognized that its patching rhythms, decision authorities, and playbooks had never been tested at that speed.
The organization engaged Bryghtpath to design and facilitate a first-of-its-kind tabletop exercise: an AI-accelerated vulnerability storm aimed at the technical teams that would carry the response, connected upward to the crisis management structure.
Approach and Results
Bryghtpath built the scenario with the company’s attack surface management team so every dependency in play was real.
A fictional open-weight AI model, Daedalus, autonomously discovered concurrent zero-day vulnerabilities, with exploitation beginning within four hours of disclosure.
Across three moves spanning ten scenario days, participants confronted a Linux kernel vulnerability across the production fleet, confirmed exploitation of a customer-facing portal by autonomous AI agents, and a third-party vulnerability with no patch available for weeks.
The exercise did what a tabletop should do: it surfaced the gaps before an adversary could. Participants made real protective decisions in the room, from geo-restricting a customer portal to elevating the budget priority of rebootless patching.
The after-action report gave leadership a clear view of strengths and opportunities, and a prioritized path to a vulnerability-storm playbook built on authority and accountability.
Key Activities
- Designed a custom AI vulnerability storm scenario grounded in the company’s real technology stack
- Facilitated a three-hour virtual tabletop for 27 participants across technical, security, business, and support functions
- Delivered simulated news reports, agency advisories, and threat intelligence to drive realism
- Documented observations across seven themes, from decision authority to workforce sustainability
- Produced prioritized recommendations in an executive-ready after-action report
Outcomes
- Validated incident declaration and escalation against an unprecedented threat tempo
- Surfaced the gap between standard patching windows and AI-speed exploitation
- Identified the decision authorities needed for production-impacting emergency action
- Confirmed customer communication channels scale for large, complex incidents
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