Objective-driven adversary emulation that runs the full intrusion lifecycle against your organization, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. You do not get a list of vulnerabilities. You get a measured answer to whether your people and controls detect and stop a determined intrusion while it is happening.
A red team operation is not a scan with a larger budget. It is a rehearsal of a targeted intrusion, executed by senior operators against objectives you choose, under rules both sides sign before the first packet leaves our infrastructure.
Every operation starts from a short list of objectives that mirror what a real adversary would want from you: reach a payment system, obtain domain administrator, exfiltrate a marked file from a restricted share, take over a build pipeline. We agree on these targets in writing at scoping, and success or failure against them is the primary result of the engagement.
A signed rules of engagement document defines scope, operating hours, prohibited actions, approval gates for sensitive steps, and named escalation contacts on both sides. A deconfliction channel to your control group stays open for the entire operation, so a suspicious event can be confirmed as ours, or as genuinely hostile, within minutes.
We run the complete intrusion chain: reconnaissance of your external footprint, initial access through phishing or exposed services, establishing a foothold, privilege escalation, lateral movement, persistence, and finally actions on objectives. No stage is assumed or skipped, because your defenders win or lose the engagement at every one of them.
Every technique we execute is logged with a timestamp, the affected asset, and its MITRE ATT&CK technique ID. Your SOC receives the operation as structured data they can replay against their own telemetry, query by query, instead of a narrative they have to interpret. Tradecraft is chosen to match the actors your sector actually faces.
The report sets our intrusion timeline against your detection timeline: what your controls observed, when they alerted, who triaged, and what happened next. Missed detections, alerts that fired without follow-up, and response steps that worked are all recorded, because each of those is a distinct engineering problem with a distinct fix.
When the goal is improvement rather than examination, our operators work alongside your SOC in real time. We execute a technique, your analysts hunt for it in their tooling, and together we tune the detection before moving to the next one. The same operation becomes a detection engineering exercise instead of a graded test, and your team keeps every rule it builds.
Red team operations reward patience. The active phase is deliberately paced so that tradecraft stays realistic and your monitoring gets a fair chance to catch it.
We agree on objectives, in-scope systems, exclusions, and approval gates, then sign the rules of engagement. A small control group on your side is named, threat intelligence about actors targeting your sector shapes the scenario, and legal authorization is documented before any activity begins.
Operators run the lifecycle from reconnaissance through actions on objectives, typically over several weeks, keeping activity quiet enough to be believable. Every action is logged with its ATT&CK technique ID, sensitive steps pass through the agreed gates, and the deconfliction channel stays open throughout.
Within five business days of operations closing you receive the report: the intrusion timeline beside your detection timeline, technical findings with evidence, and remediation guidance covering both the weaknesses we used and the detection gaps we exposed. The debrief replays the operation with your blue team in the room.
Once your fixes ship, we retest every reported finding once at no additional cost and update the report. Where the gap was in detection rather than in a system, we can re-run the relevant techniques with your SOC watching, confirming the new rules fire before you rely on them.
The operation is creative. The framework around it is not. Every engagement is planned, executed, and reported against published standards, with scope defined precisely enough that there is never a question about whether an action was authorized.
MITRE ATT&CK gives the operation a shared vocabulary. Each action we take is recorded against a technique ID, so your defenders can map our tradecraft directly onto their detection coverage and see exactly which cells of the matrix went unobserved.
Scenario design follows the intelligence-led approach used in TIBER-style exercises: the operation is built around threat intelligence describing the actors and tradecraft observed against your sector, rather than a generic attacker archetype. The technical layer, from reconnaissance through controlled exploitation, follows PTES, so individual techniques are executed and evidenced with the same discipline as any of our penetration tests.
The deliverable reads as two timelines set side by side. The intrusion narrative documents each phase of the operation with evidence, and next to it sits the record of what your controls detected and how your team responded. That comparison, not a count of vulnerabilities, is the result a red team exists to produce.
Reports and evidence move only over the encrypted channel agreed at scoping and stay accessible to you after the engagement closes. Nothing about the operation touches ordinary email.
A penetration test maximizes coverage: within a defined scope, find as many exploitable weaknesses as time allows. A red team operation maximizes realism: pursue one or two agreed objectives and take the quietest viable path to them, exactly as a targeted intruder would. The penetration test measures your systems. The red team measures your organization, including the people and processes that are supposed to notice an intrusion and act on it. If you have never been tested, start with a penetration test. Red teaming pays off once there is a detection capability worth measuring.
Usually not, and that is the point. An unannounced operation is the only honest measurement of how your monitoring and response perform against a real intrusion. Leadership and a small control group, typically two or three named people, know the full scope and hold the deconfliction channel. Everyone else experiences the operation as they would experience the real thing. If you prefer an announced exercise, the purple team format delivers that deliberately and gets more improvement per day in exchange for the loss of surprise.
A safe word is a pre-agreed phrase that either side can invoke to pause or terminate the operation immediately, no questions asked in the moment. Deconfliction is the standing channel between our operators and your control group used to confirm whether a given event is ours or genuinely hostile. If your team detects real attacker activity during the exercise, or an incident elsewhere demands full attention, the operation stands down at once and resumes only when you say so. These procedures are written into the rules of engagement before anything begins.
In a purple team engagement our operators and your SOC work the same operation together, in the open. Each technique is executed, hunted for in your telemetry, and iterated on until the detection logic fires reliably, then the plan moves to the next one. Choose it when your goal is building detection coverage rather than grading it: after a red team operation has exposed gaps, after a new SIEM or EDR deployment, or when a growing SOC needs structured contact with real tradecraft. The two formats also combine well over time: an unannounced operation one cycle to measure, a purple team the next to improve what it found.
Typically four to eight weeks end to end. Planning, intelligence gathering, and scenario design take one to two weeks, active operations run two to five weeks depending on objectives and scope, and the report follows within five business days of operations closing. The active phase is intentionally unhurried, because compressing an intrusion into a few loud days would hand your monitoring an unrealistic advantage and undercut the measurement you are paying for. You receive a firm timeline at scoping.
Tell us what a serious adversary would want from your organization and we will design an operation to pursue it, with a proposed scope and timeline within a few business days.