Red Teaming

This is worth stating plainly, because the two are routinely confused. A red team is not a more thorough penetration test, and it is not a comprehensive audit. A penetration test seeks to enumerate as much as possible in a defined scope; a red team will happily ignore ninety-nine vulnerabilities and use the hundredth, because its goal is an objective, not a catalogue. The question it answers is not can a skilled attacker get in - assume they can - but would you notice before they had loaded the van?

We begin with open-source intelligence, building a picture of your organisation from the outside: your exposed infrastructure, your supply chain, the digital footprint of your staff, the credentials of yours already circulating in breach corpora. This reconnaissance is itself a finding - it shows you what you leak before anyone has touched a system. From there we work towards agreed objectives, the "flags" that represent genuine harm: access to a sensitive data store, control of a critical system, compromise of a privileged account.

Reaching those objectives means moving through the whole lifecycle of a real intrusion. We seek initial access by whatever route proves viable within the Rules of Engagement - exploitation of an exposed service, a tailored phishing campaign, or, where in scope, physical or wireless means. Once inside, we conduct post-exploitation in earnest: privilege escalation, lateral movement across your estate, persistence to show how an attacker would survive a reboot or a password reset, and exfiltration to prove what could actually leave the building. Throughout the exercise we assess not merely whether an attack succeeds, but how visible that attack is to your organisation. A Red Teaming engagement measures the gap between attacker activity and defender awareness.

A key element of the value of a Red Teaming engagement is that it gives you an opportunity to test the effectiveness of your own security teams, such as your security operations centre (if your organisation possesses one). As such, with your permission, we keep as much as possible of your organisation in the dark about the test, and aim for your staff to believe the attack is real. This is in the spirit of intelligence-led frameworks such as CBEST and TIBER-EU. A small, trusted group within your organisation is kept informed throughout, so the exercise can be deconflicted from genuine incidents and halted safely, while the wider defending team remains unaware, preserving the realism that gives the test meaning. And if hardened defences genuinely keep us out at the perimeter, that is a valuable result in itself: we can pivot to an assumed-breach scenario, dropped in at an agreed foothold, so the engagement still produces a full picture of your internal resilience rather than stalling at a locked front door.

Adversary simulation - behaving like a real attacker would - is only the foundation of our Red Teaming engagements. Not all attackers behave in the same way. A criminal ransomware group, an opportunistic cybercriminal, a disgruntled insider, and a state-sponsored intelligence service all have different objectives, capabilities, and methods. If desired, our Red Teaming engagements can offer adversary emulation: we will do our best to act like a specific, known threat actor, rather than a generic adversary. This includes basing our approaches on real attacks they have conducted against other targets, as well as orienting our simulated attack towards their specific goals. Such exercises pair naturally with our Threat Modelling service, which helps identify which adversaries are most relevant to your organisation.

A Red Teaming engagement provides a uniquely realistic picture of how your organisation performs when confronted with a determined adversary. It reveals how technical controls, monitoring systems, operational processes, and human decision-making interact during a genuine intrusion attempt. Our Red Teaming reports aim to convey all this, and further identify the changes that would most improve its ability to detect, contain, and respond to real attacks.

Red Teaming reports are our most extensive. Firstly, they narrate the engagement as a story an attacker could have told, highlighting each point at which detection or response could have intervened. Next is the positive half: a prioritised programme of improvement focused on reducing the likelihood and impact of future attacks. We include consultations to walk your security team and executive staff through exactly what happened, as well as to advise or review remediation work conducted by your organisation based on our recommendations.