Red Teaming
Can you detect and react properly to an active targeted attack?
Our Adversarial Threat Simulation, also known as red team testing, replicates the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of advanced cyber adversaries, providing a true-to-life assessment of your organization’s resilience. This engagement validates your detection, response, and mitigation capabilities against sophisticated attacks, ensuring you stay ahead of evolving threats.
How Does This Work?
This type of engagement involves our consultants as the attacking team, traditionally know as the red team, and your internal personnel as the detection and defense team, also known as the blue team. The red team will try to breach into your systems and obtain access to some assets, the so-called high-value targets (HVTs), while avoiding detection. The blue team will not know that the engagement is ongoing and will have to act accordingly as soon as it notices that something is going on.
Threat Actor Emulation
Simulating adversaries relevant to your industry, risk landscape, and threat profile using real-world attack scenarios and current TTPs.
Lateral Movement & Persistence
Identifying long-term access points that attackers exploit for stealthy intrusions across your network infrastructure and systems.
Detection Evasion Techniques
Evaluating your monitoring, logging, and response effectiveness against modern evasion strategies and advanced persistent threats.
Post-Engagement Debrief
Delivering actionable insights to enhance security operations and close critical gaps identified during the engagement.
Targeted Assessment Options
A fully fledged red team plays our like a heist movie: our consultants start collecting information about the target, prepare a crew that could use different types of expertise during the various phases of the engagement, write custom tools to adapt to your environment and avoid detection, come onsite, use disguises. This type of engagement is very flexible and dynamic. There are situations where the budget at your disposal or regulations to adhere to require a different approach.
Our red team offering can be customized to reduce scope or follow specific regulatory requirements.
Internal Red Teaming
Internal Red teaming works like a traditional red teaming engagement but it starts from a different question. What could happen if a threat actor managed to get a foothold into your organization? They could have infected an endpoint, breached a server or bribed an employee. Our Internal Red Teaming simulates real-world attack scenarios from an insider’s perspective to assess how well your detection and response capabilities hold up against sophisticated adversaries.
Through our technical assessment and strategic collaboration with your security teams, we help elevate your resilience, reduce business risks, and enhance regulatory compliance.
The most common internal red team engagements is starting from a compromised machine and perform all the possible steps a real threat actor would follow. This approach gives you a lot of the benefits of a Red Team engagement without having to invest resources to obtain a foothold into the organization.
Purple Teaming
Sometimes you want to improve your detection and response capabilities and be ready to deal with a dedicated, competent, adversary that is targeting your organization specifically. This is where a purple team engagement comes in. Our red team will work together with your detection and protection (blue) team. Red combined with blue equals purple. That’s where you can jump directly to the improvements provided by a red team engagement without having to first measure where you stand.
It is also possible to choose a specific aspect to focus on, for example:
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) product testing. Our consultants have extensive experience in assessing if a product or its configuration are a good fit for your infrastructure and the type of software it runs.
- Security Operations Center (SOC) testing and fine-tuning. Why should you wait for a breach to happen to fire test your SOC? You can ask our consultants to team up with your blue team to find what can be improved both from a technical and process point of view.
Compliance Red Teaming
Then there are different types of engagement that have some requirements regarding the testing process and how the whole engagement is documented and carried out. Our consultants can help you augment your in-house team for DORA red team engagements or help you with the threat-based scenarios of TIBER red team tests.
Red Team Engagement Comparison
Find the right approach for your organization's security needs
| Features | Red Team | Internal Red Team | Purple Team | DORA/TIBER Compliance Testing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starting Position | External | Internal | Internal/Collaborative | External/Internal |
| Blue Team Awareness | None (Blind Test) | None (Blind Test) | Full Awareness | Varies (Regulatory-Driven) |
| Duration | Months | Weeks | Weeks | Several Months |
| Objective | Compromise High-Value Targets | Lateral Movement from Initial Access | Improve Detection & Response | Regulatory Compliance & Security Validation |
| Real-time Feedback | Limited | Limited | Extensive | Limited |
| Detection Tuning | Post-Engagement | Post-Engagement | During Engagement | Post-Engagement |
| Team Collaboration | Minimal | Minimal | Extensive | Moderate |
| Best For | Test full-spectrum detection capabilities from start to finish | Testing internal detection capabilities | Working together with your defensive team to improve detection and response capabilities | Meeting Regulatory Requirements while testing your detection capabilities |
Why Choose Arctic Owl for Red Team Testing?
Our experts replicate advanced persistent threats (APT) and modern Tactics, Techniques & Procedures (TTPs) in a controlled manner to give you realistic attack simulations. We have experience not only in (legally) breaching into multiple fortune 500 businesses but we also have experience coming from incident investigation and digital forensics. This gives Arctic Owl the edge you need for your red team needs!
Our Red Team Execution Process
In this timeline, we demonstrate how we conduct red team engagements from start to finish, whether you're a complete beginner, have a large in-house security team, or even your own internal red team. Our goal is to ensure you walk away with actionable insights to level up your defensive and detection capabilities.
Pre-Engagement Meeting
We work with you to understand your organization, threat landscape, and define your High Value Targets (HVTs).
Threat Intelligence
We research threat actors targeting your industry to make sure our attack scenarios are relevant to your business.
Rules of Engagement
We establish scope, timelines, objectives, and safety measures for the engagement.
Reconnaissance - External Attack Surface
We gather information about your organization and map your attack surface.
Initial Access
We attempt to gain a foothold in your environment through various attack vectors.
Reconnaissance - Internal Recurring Mapping
We gather information about your organization and map your attack surface from within.
Lateral Movement & Escalation
We expand access and elevate privileges to get closer to your High Value Targets (HVTs).
Comparing Notes With Blue Team
We write a comprehensive report detailing findings, attack paths and other insights. Typically for red teaming we provide workshop(s) or Q&A sessions for the defenders.
Get Started
Interested in hearing more about our Red Teaming? Contact us today for a free consultation.
Contact UsRelated Services
Why Choose Arctic Owl
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Expert Security Team
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Customized Solutions
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Proven Track Record
Frequently Asked Questions
Our process begins with an initial consultation to understand your specific requirements and environment. We then conduct a thorough assessment, throughout the engagement, we provide regular updates and insights to keep you informed of progress and findings. After the project is finished, we deliver a detailed report with all findings and actionable recommendations to help you improve your security posture.
The timeline of each assignment varies based on the complexity of your environment and the scope of the engagement. For typical smaller or mid size projects, you can expect a timeline from start to finish of 2-4 weeks. More complex environments or technologies may require additional time. During our initial consultation, we'll provide a more specific timelines based on your requirements and budget.
We design our services to minimize disruption to your business operations. We always try to work closely with your staff to know if we disrupt anything and to be smart about what features we avoid testing in production to further reduce any potential impact. For most services, your users and staff will experience no disruption during the testing process.
How do you get started?
Our proven methodology ensures a smooth journey all the way from deciding what to test, deciding how to test it to having the final report and remidations in place.
Initial Consultation
Discuss your security objectives, compliance needs, and what you want to achieve.
Scoping & Agreement
We scope the project and provide an offering with test scope, schedule, and rules of engagement.
Decision Time
We refine the scope together until it perfectly matches your requirements and objectives.
Test Execution
We carry out the agreed security assessments, keeping you informed throughout the process.
Reporting & Review
We deliver a comprehensive report and conduct a debriefing to present findings and discuss remediation strategies with your stakeholders.
Retesting & Validation
You fix the identified vulnerabilities. We optionally come back to validate the effectiveness of your remediation efforts.
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