What is Red Teaming?

Red Teaming is a type of advanced cybersecurity testing that simulates real-world adversarial attacks against a target to assess their defensive capabilities. While traditional penetration tests typically focus on identifying and producing a list of vulnerabilities, Red Teaming examines entire attack chains and the broader impact of realistic breach scenarios. Upon conclusion of testing, a detailed report or presentation is provided to the organization, and commonly contains an executive summary, scoped attacker objectives, results or findings, and security recommendations.

What is Penetration Testing?

A penetration test (pentest) is a simulated cyberattack against a particular software, system, or network in an attempt to discover bugs or vulnerabilities. The output is commonly a listing of vulnerabilities discovered, along with recommended remediation steps.

Why Would You Want to Red Team?

There are several strategic reasons why an organization would want to Red Team.

Measure Detection & Response: Are you confident that your detection and monitoring systems and processes are working correctly? If so, could you respond to an incident quickly enough to stop an adversary from causing impact? We could tell you.

Test Real-World Security Defenses: How would you fare against a low-level adversary? How about a mid-level one? Without Red Teaming, assumptions are the only thing left between your business and devastating impact.

Support Additional Security Investment: In the event that a Red Team operation is successful, the report can provide very strong evidence to support arguments for additional security investments.

When Assumptions Aren’t Enough: Red Teaming introduces external, adversarial thinking that bypasses assumptions, groupthink, and overconfidence. What may have been overlooked internally can be rooted out by the creativity of a motivated attacker.

Identify Deeper Process Gaps: Instead of looking at one vulnerability, Red Teams uncover systemic issues and larger process gaps that go deeper than a single application. This is often manifest when multiple attack steps or operations are successful and patterns of weakness start to emerge, or a capability is missing entirely.

Meet Compliance and Industry Expectations: Red Teaming helps demonstrate a mature, proactive security approach that supports both regulatory compliance (ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, etc) and industry best practices. It provides tangible evidence to auditors, regulators, customers, and partners that your organization goes beyond checklists to actively validate its defenses.