What is Red Team in Cybersecurity?

TL;DR

Looking for some quick answers about red team cybersecurity? We got it covered.

A Red Team Overview: Red team cybersecurity is the simulation of real-world attacks to evaluate and improve organizational defenses. Security professionals use threat actor tactics, like social engineering, physical break-ins, and cyber attacks, to test and strengthen their overall security posture.

The Importance of Red Team Testing: Red team testing helps organizations gain a proactive, holistic view of their defenses. Extending beyond vulnerability scans, red teams:

Identify critical security gaps
Improve detection and response capabilities
Promote employee security preparedness before a real attack

Key Benefits of Red Teaming: Red teaming offers many benefits including:

Unveils vulnerabilities across people, processes, and technology
Tests detection and incident response capabilities under the guise of a red team attack
Enhances risk management, regulatory compliance, and security processes through the refinement of weak policies, training, or resource allocation

Core Activities of Red Teamers: Red teamers typically perform offensive security tasks that include the following:

Orchestrates penetration testing, social engineering, physical security checks, and wireless and application assessments
Leverages threat intelligence and vulnerability prioritization to navigate and report weaknesses
Supports security awareness training and communicates with blue and purple teams for collaboration

What Is a Red Team in Cybersecurity?

Red teaming is a process of simulating attacks on a system or organization through an organized team of security experts, ethical hackers, or pentesters. The objective of red team cybersecurity is to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities and provide a comprehensive assessment with recommendations for improvement.

Red team penetration testing is considered a more advanced methodology than just pentesting itself, as it goes beyond vulnerability identification and focuses on emulating sophisticated attacks, testing security controls, and comprehensively evaluating an organization’s security posture.¹

What is red team in cybersecurity

Why Is Red Teaming Important?

Red teaming is important because it enhances security posture by simulating real-world attacks to uncover vulnerabilities. By identifying weaknesses in defenses, a cyber red team helps the organization refine security controls, policies, and response strategies — ultimately improving risk management and resource allocation. These realistic red team attack simulations not only ensure compliance with regulatory security testing requirements but also strengthen incident response capabilities and improve overall security posture.

Beyond technical improvements, red teaming boosts employee awareness by exposing staff to potential security threats and training them to respond effectively. Through continuous assessments and feedback, red teams support ongoing security improvements to avoid costly consequences of data breaches, regulatory fines, and reputational damage.

What is the Role of the Red Team?

The role of the red team is multifaceted and varies depending on the organization’s goals. A common red team goal is to provide comprehensive security posture assessments. This typically includes testing security controls, identifying vulnerabilities and security gaps, and providing recommendations for improvement.

Eliminate the security reporting drudgery and focus on the cybersecurity work you love. Discover in this video how you can change your life as a red teamer and create better reports in half the time.

What Are the Core Functions of a Cybersecurity Red Team?

As mentioned, the objective of the red team is to provide a thorough assessment of the business’s security posture. With that, some of the core functions and common tasks of cybersecurity red teaming include:

Penetration testing: Attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in a system
Social engineering: Testing the ability to detect and prevent attacks
Physical security testing: Assessing physical security controls
Wireless network testing: Identifying vulnerabilities and access points across networks
Application testing: Pinpointing weaknesses across the organization’s applications
Red team exercises: Conducting simulated attacks to test its incident response
Threat intelligence: Leveraging information on emerging threats or vulnerabilities
Vulnerability management: Helping prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities
Security training: Providing education to employees on security best practices
Compliance testing: Ensuring regulatory or compliance requirements are met

How to Run a Red Team Exercise?

Here is a quick breakdown of steps on how to run a red team exercise:

Outline the Scope and Establish Goals

When setting up a hacking red team exercise, define what systems and infrastructure will be leveraged in the test. From there, set clear goals such as infiltrating an HR system or exporting sensitive data. Be sure to document all attack methods, actions taken, and escalations.

Gather Intel and Define Baseline

Review threat intelligence and Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) to uncover publicly available information to exploit in the red team test. Run penetration tests and vulnerability scans to discover low-hanging fruit that can be used for further escalation and infiltration.

Create a Diverse Red Team

Leverage internal and external experts that include penetration testers, social engineers, physical access specialists, and developers for a wider perspective. And determine the proper infrastructure and timing to execute the attacks without interrupting business operations.

Reconnaissance and Threat Modeling

Scope any assets that can be used in the attack, such as websites, personnel roles, and facility layouts. Then, develop a threat model and determine adversary profiles and potential attack paths using frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK.

Perform the Red Team Attack Simulation

Using whatever means chosen — phishing, malware, physical entry, credential stuffing, etc.— to initiate access and attempt to move laterally and escalate privilege while remaining undetected by incident response systems.

Post-Attack and Detailed Reporting

Document all activities performed and note the security frameworks leveraged. Schedule a debriefing session with the blue team, stakeholders, and leaders. Together, prioritize actionable remediation including patching, process changes, and employee training.

Continuous Improvement

Create benchmarks and continuously monitor KPIs to measure overall security posture improvements and maturity over time. Red and blue teams should work closely for real-time knowledge sharing and purple team collaboration. Continuously test throughout the year to ensure the organization keeps up with the latest threats.

What Is Red Team Penetration Testing?

Red team pen testing is a core component in offensive security measures to test defenses, challenge security operation centers (SOC), and highlight how well an organization defends against a potential attack.

Inherently, red teaming leverages many tools and skills from pentesting, such as vulnerability scanning and exploiting weaknesses; however, they move discretely, deploy multi-vector attacks, and evaluate the organization’s full infrastructure and ecosystem to improve defense processes.

What Is the Difference Between Red Teaming vs Pentesting?

Often, questions around “how is red teaming different from penetration testing?” pop up because there are similarities, but here’s a simple table to explain the differences between red team pentesting vs. pentesting.

Feature	Penetration Testing	Red Team Penetration Testing
Scope	Find technical vulnerabilities within a certain defined scope	Span the full attack surface to uncover vulnerabilities across digital platforms, physical security, email, social, etc.
Knowledge of Defender	Defender is aware the test is happening	Defender is unaware in order to test defenses in a simulated red team attack
Objective	Pinpoint as many vulnerabilities and entry points as possible	Break in to achieve a mission and show what is possible, like stealing data without being detected, to strengthen incident response efforts
Tactics	Use a variety of tools to scan and exploit known flaws	Goes above and beyond for recon, phishing, physical breach, and undetectable lateral movement
Detection and Response	Provide recommendations at the end of the pentest, but not focused on blue team readiness	Test detection, SOC response, and incident handling in order to strengthen their defenses
Duration	Short process, which usually takes just a few days to weeks, depending on the scope	Longer process that usually lasts weeks to months while remaining undetectable
Resources	Can be as small as a one-person team	Often is a full team with diverse talents

What Do Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises Have in Common?

Whether the exact timing is known to the defender, a penetration test and a red teaming exercise are both done under the proper authorization and fall under the ethical, white hat hacker category. They also often use similar tools to identify and exploit vulnerabilities and document results through a comprehensive report, which includes remediation suggestions.

What Do Penetration Tests and Red Team Exercises Achieve?

Penetration tests evaluate known systems to identify vulnerabilities; whereas, red team exercises help determine the maturity of the organization’s defenses as a whole and demonstrate how an organization will withstand a real attack.

To help choose between a red team vs pentest, take a look at the chart below.

Use Case	Red Teaming	Penetration Testing
Setting Security Baselines	A full red team is not required	Helpful for setting benchmarks
Fixing Known Vulnerabilities	Usually, red teams identify security gaps across the ecosystem and let the blue team know about them for optimizations	Find known vulnerabilities and provide recommendations
Testing Defensive Operations, SOC, and Incident Response (IR) Capabilities	This directly aligns with red teaming exercises	Not typically within the scope of a pentest
Simulating real-world attacks	Absolutely	Out of scope

What Are the Benefits of Red Team Cybersecurity?

Red teams are beneficial for organizations for multiple reasons. The most prevalent benefits of red teaming include the following.

Improved security posture

Red teaming provides an objective evaluation of the overall security posture through simulated attacks and vulnerability detection. Ultimately, these findings should lead to improvements across security controls, policies, and procedures.

Better Risk Management

Using the red team’s method of simulated attacks, organizations can discover the most critical vulnerabilities to proactively identify, categorize, and prioritize risks. By focusing on high-risk areas, security teams can remain diligent and make the most of their resources to develop a risk-informed remediation plan that can evolve with the ever-changing environment.

Realistic Testing

Unlike vulnerability scans, the red team uses realistic attack scenarios, such as phishing, social engineering, and privilege escalation to identify gaps in their logging, monitoring, and alerting defenses. It also provides a safe way to test incident response protocols.

Regulatory Compliance

Many compliance regulations and frameworks, including PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST, and ISO 27001, often require regular security assessments. Having a red team can help organizations meet these requirements and demonstrate proactive security measures that are needed for audits and go beyond the minimum requirements to ensure the organization remains secure.

Employee Awareness

Red teams may provide security awareness training for employees through controlled phishing campaigns, social engineering ploys, and insider threat simulations so employees can more easily recognize and respond to security threats. This, in turn, helps staff report suspicious activities early on and establishes a security-first, zero-trust culture.

Cost-Effective

Identifying and remediating vulnerabilities before exploitation will save organizations an astronomical amount in terms of legal fees, regulatory fines, recovery costs, and potentially reputational damage, which can lead to high turnover. It also helps support better organizational budgeting through prioritized remediation and focused resources.

Continuous Improvement

Rather than a one-time-a-year exercise, red team assessments are ongoing. The team can provide regular feedback on new threats and vulnerabilities. This establishes continuous security validation and improvement to build security resilience.

What Are the Challenges of Red Teaming?

Implementing a red team may be challenging at first, as it requires the following. However, if set up properly, the benefits of red teaming are exponential.

Demands careful planning for simulated attacks to avoid disrupted operations.
Requires skilled personnel with dedicated time to execute and analyze findings.
Involves costs and time commitments for external or internal red team experts.
Necessitates continuous testing to adapt to evolving threats.
Maintains operational security (OPSEC) during exercises to ensure validity.
Collaborates effectively with both blue and purple teams.
Upholds ethics and confidentiality of test information, which is critical.

Even the most seasoned professionals can run into challenges when developing a security program. Check out our Pitfalls to Establishing a Successful Security Program to learn how to avoid building a reactive environment, measuring the wrong metrics, and more.

What Are Red Teaming Security Testing Practices?

Red teaming security testing practices typically involve several steps, such as:

Reconnaissance: Gathering information about the target’s infrastructure, network, employee names and emails, social media accounts, open source intelligence (OSINT), and any other data they can use to find entry points and attack vectors.
Vulnerability scanning: Using automated tools to scan for known vulnerabilities in systems and networks to identify security gaps for further escalation.
Exploitation: Attempting to exploit identified vulnerabilities to gain access to systems or data. Exploitation may occur through various methods, including social engineering, bypassing physical security, pentesting, password spraying, or data exfiltration
Privilege escalation: Attempting to gain higher levels of access. As a red team hacker breaks into a system or network, they attempt to move laterally to access more critical systems and mimic attacker behavior through tools like Mimikatz, PowerShell Empire, or custom payloads to gain domain admin access.
Persistence: Maintaining access over an extended time to gather intelligence or perform additional attacks using hacker tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that are often bypassed by security tools such as EDR, SIEM, SOAR, XDR, and antivirus.
Reporting: Documenting vulnerability findings and providing recommendations. Reports often include steps taken to achieve escalation, screenshots, and remediation tips.

Additionally, red teams may develop custom payloads to bypass endpoint defenses, work with the blue team for purple team collaboration, or provide security awareness training to test the business’s response plans.

What Are Red Teaming Examples?

Red teams use several tactics to break through and prove that escalation is possible, including the following examples and use cases.

Example 1: Phishing for Domain Access

The red team crafts and sends a tailored phishing email to a targeted employee with a link to capture credentials, providing initial access. Using these credentials and exploiting security gaps in the current infrastructure, the red teamer escalates privileges to domain admin.

This use case tests employee security awareness, as well as evaluates how quickly the security operations center (SOC) team can detect and respond to the incident.

Example 2: Compromising the Cloud

A red teamer discovers an identity and access management (IAM) incident in the AWS cloud storage. As soon as the red teamer noticed, they used the known access to acquire sensitive information and move laterally across the system infrastructure.

This use case unveils cloud misconfigurations and weak identity management protocols to correct and amplify the organization’s cloud incident response procedures.

Anytime the red team can infiltrate and find weaknesses, they craft detailed reports of the incident to help the blue team strengthen their detection and response tools and protocols.

Additional Red Team Cybersecurity Use Cases

Other red team use cases include:

Penetration Testing: Exploit vulnerabilities in software, hardware, or network configurations through red teaming techniques such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) to gain access to sensitive data or execute malicious actions.
Social Engineering Attacks: Leverage deceptive tactics, like impersonating IT support or using fake pretexts to obtain unauthorized credentials, personal data, or further access.
Leveraging AI: Launch attacks on AI models to identify vulnerabilities and potential biases to ensure that artificial intelligence and machine learning applications are working with precision.

For more detailed use cases, check out CISA | Enhancing Cyber Resilience: Insights from CISA Red Team Assessment of a US Critical Infrastructure Sector Organization.²

What Are Common Tools Used in Red Teaming?

The red team has an arsenal of tools to simulate attacks and identify vulnerabilities. Some of the most common tools include:

Red Teaming Tool	Purpose & Function	Examples
Reconnaissance Tools	Gather information about the target organization’s systems, network, and employees to identify potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities.	Nmap, Shodan, and Recon-ng
Weaponization Tools	Create and customize malware or exploit payloads to simulate real-world attacks and test an organization’s defenses against them.	Metasploit, Empire, and Cobalt Strike
Delivery and Exploitation Tools	Deliver malware or exploit payloads to target systems or networks to test a company’s ability to detect and respond to attacks.	Social engineering tactics, spear-phishing emails, and drive-by downloads
Escalation Tools	Gain higher levels of access within a target system or network to move laterally within a network and escalate their privileges to gather sensitive information.	Mimikatz, BloodHound, and PowerUp
Lateral Movement Tools	Move laterally within a target system or network once access has been gained to pivot to other systems or networks and continue down their attack path.	PsExec, WinRM, and Secure Shell (SSH)
Hacktrails	Cover tracks and avoid detection to continue to escalate privilege.	Metasploit, Meterpreter, and Cobalt Strike
Collaboration and Management Tools	Manage red team operations and facilitate collaboration among team members to track their efforts and progress towards achieving their objectives through reporting, collaboration, and management tools.	Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and PlexTrac

What Are the Differences Between Red Teaming and Blue Teaming?

Red teaming focuses on offensive tactics such as pentesting and adversary emulation to simulate real-world attacks by exploiting vulnerabilities and pinpointing security weaknesses before real adversaries can do so.

In contrast to blue vs red team cybersecurity, blue teaming focuses on defensive tactics against these attacks, such as threat hunting and incident response. Blue teamers protect the organization through proactive and preventive measures. They defend against real or simulated exploitation by identifying anomalies that could indicate nefarious activity and remediate them to prevent or mitigate the damage of cyber attacks.

The red team is composed of offensive security experts who require comprehensive knowledge of both technical and nontechnical aspects of creating and simulating attacks. On the other hand, the blue team is composed of defensive security experts who develop security programs against cyberattacks and typically have a more narrow approach that focuses on the technical defenses.

Watch this video to learn more about the differences and similarities between red teams vs blue teams.

What Are the Differences Between Red Teaming vs Purple Teaming?

When it comes to defining red team vs purple team, purple teaming is a newer approach to security testing. It is a collaboration between red teaming and blue teaming activities, often in real-time, to strengthen the attack surface. Just like color mixing, it combines the red team blue team exercise of offensive and defensive strategies to detect, respond to, and stop cyber threats.

The main differences between the red team and purple team are that the red team’s objective is to simulate attacks and identify vulnerabilities in a company’s security posture, while the purple team’s objective is to test and improve the effectiveness of existing security controls.

In terms of team structure, the red team is composed of offensive security experts. On the other hand, the purple team is made up of both offensive and defensive security experts who collaborate to test, improve, and validate security measures.

While red teams focus on pinpointing vulnerabilities and weaknesses, the purple team focuses on continuous assessments and improvements through the red and blue team efforts.

Watch this video to learn more about the differences between the red team vs blue team vs purple team, and how they can all work together.

What Are the Key Takeaways for a Cybersecurity Red Team?

For a quick wrap-up, a cybersecurity red team simulates realistic cyber attacks to evaluate and strengthen the organization’s security posture. Once red team security testing has been performed, it should help direct the overall improvement of detection, response, and compliance processes. Red teaming requires expert planning, skilled teams, strict rules, and regular execution to be effective.

Red team testing benefits include:

Improved security posture across people, processes, and technology
Enhanced detection and response by testing blue team response capabilities
Better compliance and risk management by helping promote prioritized remediation
Greater employee security awareness with ongoing phishing simulations and trainings

Red teaming cybersecurity best practices include:

Define clear goals and outline the scope of red team exercises
Leverage frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK³, Cyber Kill Chain⁴, or NIST 800-115⁵
Reference open sources like OWASP Top Ten⁶ to stay up to date on the latest threats
Collaborate between the red and blue teams for continuous testing and improvement
Conduct tailored red teaming exercises regularly

How PlexTrac Helps With Red Teaming?

As a red teamer, whether you’re using the platform for tabletop exercises, pentesting, proactive security assessments, adversary emulation, or for another use case altogether, PlexTrac has features that will help you work more effectively and report more efficiently.

In addition to a slew of red and blue functionality, the platform also looks to unify security teams of all makeups, emphasizing the need for purple teaming collaboration. No more siloed teams or adversarial relationships.

Manage the full security lifecycle and watch your security posture strengthen with PlexTrac. Discover how PlexTrac can boost your security team’s efficiency today by booking a demo or keep learning on our blog.

FAQ

Is Red Teaming Ethical?

Yes, red teaming is ethical. As long as the red teaming exercise is conducted with proper authorization and adheres to legal standards, red teaming is an ethical white hat hacking practice.

Responsible red team hackers prioritize safety, legality, and operational integrity to not disrupt any business operations and optimize an organization’s defenses.

How Does Red Teaming Help Compliance?

Red teaming supports compliance in several ways. Regular red team exercises help:

Provide evidence of proactive security testing to meet requirements in frameworks like ISO 27001, NIS2, SOC 2, DORA, and others.
Demonstrate continuous testing and measurable improvements for compliance audits.
Uncover gaps across technologies, procedures, and people.
Support risk management and regulatory expectations by helping the blue team update their incident response plans.

What Is the Difference Between Red Teams and SOCs?

Red teams take an offensive approach to security by simulating attacks to test detection and response capabilities. Whereas security operation centers (SOCs) are built for defensive purposes to fortify the organization through continuous monitoring, detection, and response to threats. These teams can work together for purple team collaboration to optimize the security lifecycle and continue to strengthen the security posture.

Who Should Consider Red Teaming?

Organizations that are mature in the security lifecycle should consider red teaming. If the organization has already run several penetration tests, it can optimize its efforts through red teaming security testing to advance defenses and heighten SOC capabilities for quicker, more efficient incident response.

Red Team Cybersecurity Sources

Discover more about red teaming through these additional red team cybersecurity sources:

Related Resources

What Is Red Teaming?
PlexTrac for Red Teamers
The Offensive Security Maturity Model: Get Ahead of Threats
Collaboration in Cybersecurity
Three Solutions to Common Red Teaming Problems
Measuring Your Offensive Security Maturity
The Cybersecurity Status Quo: Red vs. Blue Teams
Red Team Data Aggregation
Hack to the Future
The Gold Standard of Continuous Pentesting
Video: Red and Blue, Together Forever: Committing to Purple Team Collaboration

Related Terms