Washington D.C., October 17, 2019 — The Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) hosted its first-ever sector-wide Securing Retail Alliance (SRA) tabletop exercise on September 23, 2019 in Denver, CO, preceding the 2019 Retail Cyber Intelligence Summit.
The SRA is a community within RH-ISAC that fosters a collaborative forum to share best practices on how resource-strapped teams can maximize resources – including those provided by the RH-ISAC – to strengthen their defenses and be better able to communicate their position and future needs with internal stakeholders.
“I am thrilled to have helped put together this tabletop exercise. With more than 45 participants from 24 member companies, this tabletop was a huge success,” said Carlos Kizzee, vice president of intelligence at RH-ISAC. He added, “The best part was how participants used the ISAC as they should. We had multiple channels of communication replicating the RH-ISAC operating environment available during the event and participants were on it sharing intel. It was great to see how being a member of an ISAC can assist in these emergency situations.”
The tabletop exercise, sponsored by Castle, included security analysts, CISOs, engineers and security managers that formed seven teams with four to six different member companies on each team. More than 40 injects were given throughout the three-hour exercise. Attendees experienced first-hand how the industry responds to an incident and left the exercise with best practice improvements to incorporate into their incident response plans.
Rocco Grillo, managing director of global cyber risk services at Alvarez & Marsal, and leaders from Target observed and assisted as needed throughout the exercise. They were able to guide many first timers throughout the exercise, and provided expertise on key elements of incident response.
Grillo stated: “Collaboration to combat the evolving cyber threat and increasing sophistication of attacks is one of the foundations of RH-ISAC. This initiative, offered to RH-ISAC members, is another example of how the RH-ISAC brings together world class CISOs from leading retail and hospitality companies to provide thought leadership and insights, generate collaboration among members and support other member firms in enhancing, or even in developing their cyber resilience strategies and overall cybersecurity program. It was an honor to assist with this exercise.”
The RH-ISAC will be hosting future sector-wide tabletop exercises in 2020. If you are interested in becoming a member of RH-ISAC or learning more about our sector-wide exercises, contact us at [email protected]/rh.
About the SRA
The mission of the RH-ISAC Securing Retail Alliance (SRA) Committee is to foster a collaborative forum to share best practices on how resource-strapped teams can maximize resources – including those provided by the RH-ISAC – to strengthen their defenses and be better able to communicate their position and future needs with internal stakeholders.
Media Contacts
Annie Chambliss
RH-ISAC Marketing & Communications
[email protected]
About RH-ISAC
The Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC) is the trusted community for sharing sector-specific cybersecurity information and intelligence. The RH-ISAC connects information security teams at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels to work together on issues and challenges, to share practices and insights, and to benchmark among each other – all with the goal of building better security for consumer-facing industries through collaboration. RH-ISAC serves businesses including retailers, restaurants, hotels, gaming casinos, food retailers, consumer products, and other consumer-facing companies. For more information, visit www.rhisac.org.
