Red Teaming

We emulate a real-world adversary from initial contact to final objective, then report how far the attack progressed and whether it was detected.

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Overview

A red team engagement answers a different question than a penetration test. Rather than cataloguing individual weaknesses, it determines whether a capable attacker already inside your environment would be detected before reaching their objective. We emulate the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors relevant to organisations like yours, continuing until we reach the objective or your team detects the activity. Either outcome is a useful result. The engagement assesses your people and processes as much as your technology, because that is where a real intrusion moves when the technology holds.

When is a red team appropriate?

A red team is most valuable once you have established monitoring, an incident response process, and detection capabilities you are prepared to test. If your most recent penetration test surfaced missing patches and default credentials, remediate those first: a red team will identify the same gaps at greater cost and provide less new insight. The engagement justifies its investment once the question has shifted from whether you are vulnerable to whether an intrusion would be detected in time, across human processes as well as technical controls.

Our Approach

Objective-based Testing

A concrete objective is agreed before the engagement begins: reaching the payment database, obtaining domain administrator access, or retrieving a specific file. Success is measured against that objective and what your defenders observed, rather than a count of findings.

APT Emulation

We select an advanced persistent threat (APT) profile that plausibly targets your sector and operate within its tradecraft: the same access routes, tooling patterns and pace. Your detections are tested against behaviour you could genuinely face rather than generic activity any control would identify.

End-to-end Scenarios

The attack chain runs from the initial email through to data leaving the network, crossing the organisational seams where detection commonly fails. Findings are rarely a single vulnerability; more often they combine a process gap, such as an unverified password reset, with an alert that was never reviewed.

Collaborative Debriefs

After the engagement, we review the full timeline with your blue team: each action taken, the log evidence that should have identified it, and why specific rules did not fire. These sessions often provide as much value as the written report.

Methods & Tools

Social Engineering

Phishing campaigns modelled on the vendors and internal tools your staff routinely receive email from, pretext calls to the help desk, and, where scope permits, physical access attempts.

Network and Application Exploitation

Once a foothold is established, internal services receive the scrutiny typically reserved for the perimeter. Many of the systems we exploit were assumed safe because they sit behind the VPN.

Lateral Movement and Privilege Escalation

Harvesting credentials from memory and network shares, abusing trust relationships between systems, and escalating from a standard user account toward full administrative control.

Custom Red Team Toolkits

Cobalt Strike and Metasploit, supplemented by tooling modified for each engagement, so your endpoint controls must detect behaviour rather than match a known signature.

MITRE ATT&CK Aligned Reporting

Every action is logged against its MITRE ATT&CK technique and the threat intelligence behind it, showing which tactics your organisation detected and which went unobserved.

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics in Red Teaming

MITRE ATT&CK is a publicly maintained catalogue of observed adversary behaviour, organised by tactic rather than by product. We map every action in an engagement to the framework, converting the narrative report into a coverage matrix your detection engineers can apply directly:

Initial Access

Phishing, exploiting public-facing applications, or supply chain compromise to gain a foothold.

Execution

Running malicious code via scripts, macros, or remote services.

Persistence

Creating new user accounts, scheduled tasks, or registry modifications to maintain access.

Privilege Escalation

Exploiting vulnerabilities or misconfigurations to gain higher-level permissions.

Defense Evasion

Disabling security tools, obfuscating files, or clearing logs to avoid detection.

Credential Access

Harvesting passwords, hashes, or tokens using tools like Mimikatz.

Discovery

Enumerating users, hosts, and network shares to map the environment.

Lateral Movement

Moving between systems using stolen credentials or remote desktop tools.

Collection

Gathering sensitive files, screenshots, or keystrokes.

Exfiltration

Transferring stolen data out of the network via encrypted channels.

Impact

Simulating ransomware, data destruction, or business disruption scenarios.

Why MITRE Matters

Threat-Informed Defense

Security investment is directed at the techniques threat groups operating in your sector have been observed using, rather than a generic checklist.

Measurable Improvement

Subsequent engagements are measured against the same matrix, showing tactic by tactic whether detection capability has improved.

Actionable Insights

Each finding is tied to a specific technique, allowing analysts to trace a recommendation directly to the detection rule it belongs in.

Continuous Learning

The framework is updated by the global security community as new tradecraft emerges, keeping the benchmark aligned with the current threat landscape.

Workforce Credentials

OSCP

OSEP

CRTE

CRTO

CEH

CISSP

And more

Ready to Test Your Defenses?

Tell us which assets matter most to your organisation, and we will scope an engagement around reaching them. The result shows what your defenders observe when an attacker is genuinely inside the network.