Red Team Testing

A red team exercise is a realistic simulated attack on your organization, approved by leadership but kept secret from most of your defenders. It answers one question: could a determined attacker reach your most valuable systems or data without being noticed? The answer shows whether your investment in monitoring and response works when it matters.

Red team or penetration test?

A penetration test tries to find as many weaknesses as possible in a defined set of systems, within a fixed window. A red team works towards a goal instead, such as reaching the payment system or the customer database. It can use any route you have approved to get there: technical attacks, phishing emails, phone calls, even walking into a building. What it really measures is how well your people, processes and security tools detect and respond.

For that reason, red teaming suits organizations that already test regularly and have a security operations center (SOC), in-house or outsourced. If you have never had a penetration test, start there.

Possible routes in

  • Technical: internet-facing systems, the internal network, web applications, wireless networks, protection on laptops and servers, and cloud accounts.
  • People: phishing emails, phone calls and pretexting (approaching staff with a believable cover story), to see whether staff spot the approach and report it.
  • Physical: doors, badges, locks and reception procedures, only where you explicitly authorize it.

How an exercise unfolds

It begins with objectives and rules. We agree the target with you, for example customer data, payment systems or full administrator control of the network. A small group on your side, called the white team, knows about the exercise and can pause it at any time. Legal authorization and emergency contacts are in place before anything starts.

Our operators then study the attacker groups most relevant to your sector and research your organization from public sources. They gain a first foothold through the agreed routes, then try to move quietly towards the target, testing whether your monitoring raises the alarm. The aim is to prove access to the target without disrupting the business.

Afterwards we replay the attack step by step with your defenders. This joint session, often called purple teaming, is where detection rules get tuned and the lessons stick.

You can choose how much your defenders know beforehand. Telling them nothing measures real detection. Briefing them partly or fully turns the exercise into faster, hands-on training. Throughout, techniques are mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, a public catalogue of how real attackers operate.

What leadership receives

  • An executive report stating which objectives were reached, with evidence and the business impact.
  • A full attack timeline showing which techniques your team detected, missed or blocked.
  • Time to detect and time to respond, as measured during the exercise.
  • Prioritized recommendations for prevention, detection and response, mapped to NIST CSF, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 and PCI DSS.
  • A debrief for executives and a hands-on workshop for your defenders.

Every exercise runs under strict rules of engagement and a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Discuss a red team engagement to set objectives and scenarios.