Red Team Operations
Test your detection and response against a real attacker, not a checklist
A red team engagement differs from a penetration test in intent. A penetration test seeks breadth of findings. A red team pursues a specific objective, quietly, the way a real adversary would, and measures your organisation's ability to detect and respond along the way. The output is as much about your defensive gaps as your technical vulnerabilities.
When you need this
- →You have security controls and monitoring but have never tested them against a real adversary
- →You want to know what your SOC would actually catch, and how quickly
- →A penetration test keeps coming back clean and you suspect it is not telling the whole story
- →Leadership wants evidence of how the organisation performs under a realistic attack
What is included
Phishing and social engineering
Realistic pretext development and campaign execution to establish initial access.
Initial access and foothold
Payload development and delivery designed to survive contact with endpoint defences.
Lateral movement
Quiet propagation through the environment using credential reuse and living-off-the-land techniques.
Active Directory compromise
Escalation through the domain to the agreed objective, documenting every attack path found.
Detection gap analysis
A record of which actions were detected, which were missed, and what telemetry was absent.
How the engagement runs
Objective setting
Agree the goal, the rules of engagement, and which teams are aware the exercise is happening.
Reconnaissance
OSINT against the organisation and its people to build realistic pretexts and target lists.
Execution
Initial access, persistence, lateral movement, and escalation toward the objective.
Debrief
Joint session walking your defenders through the full timeline against their own telemetry.
What you receive
- ✓Red team report with the full attack narrative
- ✓Attack path diagrams showing each route to the objective
- ✓MITRE ATT&CK technique mapping
- ✓Detection and response gap analysis
- ✓Purple team debrief session with your defenders
- ✓Prioritised detection engineering recommendations
Tooling
Common questions
How is a red team engagement different from a penetration test?
A penetration test aims for breadth, finding and reporting as many vulnerabilities as possible in a defined scope, and your team usually knows it is happening. A red team engagement aims for a specific objective, operates quietly, and tests whether your people, processes, and detection actually work. Penetration testing answers what is vulnerable. Red teaming answers whether you would notice.
Should our security team know the engagement is happening?
Usually only a small number of people should know, which is what makes the detection results meaningful. A named control contact always knows, so activity can be verified as authorised and the exercise can be stopped immediately if needed. Whether the wider SOC is informed depends on whether you are testing detection or running a collaborative purple team exercise.
Is this safe to run against production?
Yes, with the right rules of engagement. Destructive actions are excluded, data is never exfiltrated in bulk, sensitive systems can be placed out of scope, and there is an agreed stop procedure with an emergency contact throughout. The goal is to demonstrate what an attacker could do, not to cause the damage yourself.
Discuss a red team operations engagement
Scoping conversations are free and produce a fixed quote before any work begins.
Get in touch