What is Red Teaming in Cybersecurity?

Red team cybersecurity represents one of the most comprehensive approaches to testing an organization’s security defenses. Unlike traditional security assessments, red teaming simulates real-world attack scenarios to identify vulnerabilities across people, processes, and technology. This methodology provides organizations with actionable insights into their actual security posture against sophisticated threats.

Red teaming involves a group of security professionals who act as adversaries, attempting to breach an organization’s defenses using the same tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) employed by real attackers. The goal isn’t just to find vulnerabilities, but to demonstrate how those weaknesses could be exploited in a coordinated attack campaign.

As David Mound, Senior Penetration Tester from SecurityScorecard emphasizes: “You’re going to get a realistic threat simulation. So everything that we do is always aligned to how threat actors are operating in the current cyberspace. So we’ll always put scenarios that kind of mimic what we would see in the real world situation so that when your SOC team are dealing with it, they’re dealing with things that are very close to being real anyway.“

Link to a webinar: Building a Strong Defence: Red Team Insights for Cybersecurity

Red Teaming Methodology

The red teaming methodology follows a structured approach that mirrors real-world attack campaigns. This process typically involves nine key phases that create a comprehensive assessment of an organization’s security posture.

Planning Phase: This initial stage requires extensive coordination across multiple organizational departments. As noted in SecurityScorecard’s research, “Planning a Red Team exercise involves more than just selecting the right team.” The planning phase includes defining scope, objectives, rules of engagement, and reporting requirements.

Reconnaissance: Red teamers gather intelligence about the target organization using open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques. This includes mapping the external attack surface, identifying key personnel, and understanding the organization’s technology stack.

Enumeration: During this phase, teams validate information gathered during reconnaissance and build a more complete picture of potential attack vectors.

Exploitation: Red teamers craft and execute exploits to breach the organization’s perimeter defenses. This can involve technical exploits, social engineering, or physical security breaches.

Post-Exploitation: Once inside the network, teams focus on lateral movement, privilege escalation, and achieving their defined objectives while remaining undetected.

Persistence: Teams establish methods to maintain access and return to compromised systems if their initial access is discovered and removed.

Reporting and Debriefing: Teams document all findings, create comprehensive reports, and conduct debriefing sessions with stakeholders.

Cleanup: All tools, backdoors, and modifications made during the exercise are removed to ensure the organization’s security isn’t compromised after the engagement.

How Does it Work?

Mound explains it: “We’re going to run both manual and automated techniques. We’re going to look for the vulnerabilities, and we’re going to show you where those vulnerabilities are so that you can fix them before they can be exploited by real attackers.

So who’s going to benefit from having a Red Team? Stakeholders of the business, obviously they care about the data that’s contained within those systems. So if they can have assurance that you’ve done everything to make sure that data is as protected as it can be, they’re obviously going to benefit from that. Developers themselves, they’re not necessarily security experts, so it’s always good to have dialogue with developers of applications so that they can get an understanding of these different types of vulnerabilities. 

We obviously have a much deeper understanding of where these vulnerabilities occur, seeing them day in and day out. So training developers in how to spot these things and stopping them from creeping into their own code is also going to be beneficial to security professionals themselves. So this is not our security professionals, but within your organization you may have security professionals running a SOC, and having a red team is going to give them the confidence that they can actually do their job. They may feel like they’ve not got enough visibility over a particular part of the network. So a red team can kind of expose that and help them get the required event and logging data that they need in order to increase their visibility and to give them that peace of mind and that confidence that they’ve got visibility over the estate to be able to defend it themselves.”

The Importance of the Red Team

Red team exercises provide unique value that traditional security assessments cannot deliver. They test not only technical controls but also human factors, incident response procedures, and the effectiveness of security awareness programs.

One of the most significant benefits is revealing blind spots in security monitoring and detection capabilities. Red team exercises often expose gaps where organizations believe they have visibility but actually don’t. This insight helps security teams improve their monitoring, alerting, and response capabilities.

The methodology also provides realistic threat simulation that aligns with current adversary tactics. 

As Segev Eliezer, Penetration Tester at SecurityScorecard explains in the webinar: “One of the biggest attack vectors that threat actors use to get internal access into a company is phishing. Because phishing typically relies on the weakest link in any organization, which are the humans themselves. Your organization is only as strong as your weakest link.”

Red team exercises help organizations understand their actual risk exposure versus their perceived risk. Many organizations implement security controls but never validate their effectiveness against realistic attack scenarios. Red teaming bridges this gap by providing an evidence-based assessment of security posture.

Red Team vs. Blue Team

The cybersecurity industry often discusses red teams and blue teams as opposing forces, but they serve complementary roles in improving organizational security.

• Red Teams focus on offensive security operations. They simulate adversary behavior, identify vulnerabilities, and demonstrate attack paths that could lead to business impact. Red teams think like attackers and use similar tools, techniques, and methodologies.
• Blue Teams represent the defensive side of cybersecurity. They monitor networks, analyze security events, respond to incidents, and implement protective measures. Blue teams focus on detection, response, and recovery capabilities.

The most effective security programs incorporate both red and blue team activities. Red teams identify weaknesses and attack paths, while blue teams strengthen defenses and improve detection capabilities based on red team findings.

• Purple Teams represent a collaborative approach where red and blue teams work together throughout an exercise. This methodology maximizes learning opportunities and ensures that defensive improvements are implemented based on offensive findings.

Examples of Red Team Exercises

SecurityScorecard’s experts have conducted red team exercises across various industries, revealing common patterns and unique challenges. Here are real-world examples that demonstrate the value of red teaming:

Telecommunications Company: This engagement revealed significant gaps in threat detection and incident response. The red team identified a lack of proper threat prioritization and poor incident response procedures. These findings helped the organization restructure its security operations center and implement better monitoring capabilities.

Healthcare Organization: The exercise exposed insufficient security protocols, unencrypted data at rest, and weak physical security controls. Given the sensitivity of healthcare data and HIPAA compliance requirements, these findings were particularly concerning and led to comprehensive security improvements.

Financial Institution: This engagement highlighted the human factor in security breaches. The red team identified a lack of employee security awareness, a misconfigured Active Directory infrastructure, and vulnerable email systems. The combination of these factors created multiple attack paths that could have resulted in a significant financial and regulatory impact.

Each of these examples demonstrates how red team exercises reveal the interconnected nature of security vulnerabilities. Attackers don’t rely on a single vulnerability but instead chain together multiple weaknesses to achieve their objectives.

How the Red Team Security Testing Process Works

The red team security testing process begins long before any actual testing occurs. Successful exercises require extensive planning and coordination across multiple organizational stakeholders.

Pre-Engagement Planning

This phase involves defining clear objectives, establishing rules of engagement, and obtaining proper authorization. Legal considerations are particularly important, as red team activities can potentially violate laws if not properly authorized and scoped. Organizations should align their red team exercises with established cybersecurity frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to ensure comprehensive coverage and compliance with industry standards.

Attack Surface Analysis

Red teams use tools like SecurityScorecard’s Attack Surface Intelligence platform to map the organization’s external-facing assets and identify potential entry points, including supply chain cyber risk exposure through vendor connections and third-party integrations

Initial Access

Teams attempt to gain their first foothold in the target environment. This often involves social engineering techniques, as demonstrated in the webinar where experts showed how phishing through Microsoft Teams can bypass email security filters.

Lateral Movement

Once inside the network, red teams focus on moving through the environment to reach high-value targets. Common techniques include:

• Credential reuse and password attacks
• NTLM relaying attacks
• Active Directory misconfigurations
• Certificate authority vulnerabilities
• Print Spooler exploitation

Objective Achievement

The ultimate goal varies based on the exercise scope but often includes accessing sensitive data, gaining administrative privileges, or demonstrating business impact.

Documentation and Cleanup

Teams maintain detailed logs of all activities and ensure complete removal of any tools or modifications made during the exercise.

Following a red team exercise, organizations often need ongoing support to address the identified vulnerabilities and maintain an improved security posture. 

Managed services like MAX can provide continuous monitoring and expert guidance to help organizations implement and maintain the security improvements recommended by red team findings.