Red teaming is a practical, business-oriented way to test how a determined adversary could move through your real environment. It is not a scanner report and not an abstract compliance checklist. It is a disciplined exercise designed to uncover realistic attack paths that matter to your organization’s outcomes.
This article explains how we and our contractors and partners run red-team exercises so that executives, risk owners, and engineering leads can read the results, act on them, and measure improvement without drowning in noise.
You will see clear definitions, the most important metrics, common anti-patterns to avoid, and a repeatable way to turn findings into durable guardrails.
Key definitions (plain language)
Adversary simulation: A controlled exercise where we and our contractors and partners behave like a realistic attacker to test your defenses end-to-end: exposure, identity, lateral movement, data access, and detection/response.
Dwell time: The time an attacker remains inside your environment before being detected and contained. Lower dwell time reduces damage.
Privilege staging: The sequence of steps that turns a low-privilege foothold into business-impacting access.
Lateral movement: How an attacker pivots between systems, identities, or trust boundaries after gaining an initial foothold.
Impact path: A reproducible chain from an entry point to an outcome your leadership cares about (for example, sensitive data read, payment fraud, supply-chain abuse, or production service control).
Guardrail: A small, durable control that reliably blocks or detects an attack path without heavy operational burden—e.g., signing and verifying deployable artifacts, isolating CI runners, or enforcing phishing-resistant MFA on sensitive flows.
Why executives should care
- • It measures real risk, not theoretical lists. We and our contractors and partners show how an attacker would actually reach things the board cares about—data, payments, production—so prioritization becomes obvious.
- • It converts findings into a handful of guardrails that stick. Teams can adopt them, measure them, and keep them over time.
- • It creates a clean feedback loop: exercise → fix → retest → improve metrics like dwell time, time-to-contain, and time-to-recover.
Scope, legality, and accountability
Every red-team engagement we coordinate with our contractors and partners starts with a written scope, rules of engagement, and named decision-makers. This is how we keep the exercise safe, legal, and aligned with business value.
- • Scope defines what’s in-bounds (targets, time windows, methods) and any sensitive assets that require pre-approval to touch.
- • Rules of engagement define how we operate quietly, when we pause, and how we escalate concerns if a risk threshold is reached.
- • Accountability means we and our contractors and partners carry responsibility both ways: we protect the contractor, and we protect your organization, ensuring the testing is lawful, documented, and conducted with care.
Safe handling: double-encrypted PoCs
When a proof-of-concept (PoC) artifact is required, we and our contractors and partners deliver it with two layers of encryption. The inner layer is encrypted with your public key so only you can decrypt the contents. The outer layer uses a unique session key for transit protection and integrity.
This protocol ensures we cannot see the PoC’s sensitive contents while still guaranteeing a smooth, integrity-checked handoff to your team. We document key exchange and retain only the metadata needed for audit and retest scheduling.
Method: black-box, real-world
We and our contractors and partners begin from the outside with no internal knowledge, mirroring how an adversary would approach your organization. We emphasize web applications and APIs, because that is where most external trust meets your internal systems.
We escalate only when warranted, stop when meaningful impact is proven, and focus on steps your engineers can replay. Findings are not abstract—they are tied to requests, commands, headers, identities, and environment assumptions that can be verified and fixed.
What you get (and what you won’t)
- • Replayable steps: exact requests/commands, with prerequisites and expected responses, so teams can confirm the path and test the fix.
- • Impact narrative: a short business story of what the attacker could do and why it matters, without diluting technical detail.
- • Guardrails: a small set of durable, low-friction controls that block or detect the path—prioritized by cost and leverage.
- • What you won’t get: a 200-page list of theoretical issues. We and our contractors and partners focus on meaningful paths and verify fixes.
Anatomy of a realistic impact path
- Entry: an exposed web/API surface with a weakness (misconfiguration, auth gap, input handling, or a business-logic oversight).
- Foothold: a way to establish repeatable access—e.g., a low-priv session, token, or tenant-scoped identity.
- Staging: discovering secrets, mis-scoped permissions, or CI/CD pivots that expand what we can reach.
- Lateral moves: pivot across identities, services, or environments to get closer to real impact.
- Impact: a concrete, reproducible outcome (e.g., sensitive data read, payment manipulation, deploy tampering) documented with evidence.
Metrics leaders can track
- • Dwell time: How long before detection and containment. Aim to shorten this every cycle.
- • Time-to-contain: How quickly the team can isolate the path once it’s found.
- • Time-to-recover: How quickly the environment returns to a safe, normal state.
- • Guardrail coverage: Percent of systems or pipelines protected by the recommended guardrails (e.g., signing + verification, scoped runners, phishing-resistant MFA).
- • Retest success rate: Paths that remain blocked on verification after fixes.
Best practices: identity and session control
- • Phishing-resistant MFA (platform authenticators or hardware tokens) for admin and high-risk flows.
- • Short-lived tokens and session binding (tie tokens to device posture or strong client signals where feasible).
- • Least-privilege roles, reviewed on a schedule, with revocation measured in hours—not weeks.
- • Break-glass procedures with audit; don’t let emergency access become daily access.
Best practices: web and API exposure
- • Inventory: know every internet-facing app, API, and endpoint; test the things customers and partners actually hit.
- • AuthN/AuthZ consistency: avoid mixing session models; enforce authorization checks at the correct boundary, not just in the UI.
- • Input handling: validate by intent, not by blacklist; prefer allowlists and typed schemas.
- • Secrets discipline: remove long-lived static secrets from code and logs; rotate on role changes and incidents.
Best practices: CI/CD integrity
- • Signing + verification: sign build artifacts and verify before promotion and deploy. Fail closed on mismatches.
- • Scoped runners/executors: isolate by repo, tenant, and sensitivity; no shared admin runners.
- • Secrets in pipelines: prefer short-lived credentials via brokers; restrict pipelines from reading prod secrets by default.
- • Dependency provenance: lockfiles and internal mirrors on critical paths; alert on unexpected sources.
Common anti-patterns that waste time
- • Trying to enumerate every possible bug instead of proving the handful of paths that matter most.
- • Shipping a massive report that no one implements. Fewer, stronger guardrails beat long lists.
- • Running loud tests that distort detection metrics; quiet ops give more honest signals.
- • Skipping retest. Without verification, it’s hard to know if risk actually dropped.
Whistleblowing and internal reporting (safety first)
We and our contractors and partners support protected reporting channels so employees can surface compliance or security concerns without fear. Anonymous intake, responsible triage, and repair without harm to the reporter are part of our ethos.
Delivery, training, and retest
Findings are delivered with replay steps engineers can run. Where needed, we and our contractors and partners provide training for the specific fixes—e.g., implementing artifact verification, tightening identity scopes, or clarifying API authorization boundaries.
Retest is scheduled to verify the path is closed. We update metrics so leadership sees tangible progress: fewer steps to block, better detection fidelity, and shorter time-to-contain.
How to run a high-signal exercise
- Pick outcomes, not tools: decide which impact matters (data, payments, production availability) and shape scope around that.
- Name decision-makers and comms paths: faster decisions mean safer, clearer exercises.
- Calibrate quiet ops: test detections honestly; avoid tipping off defenders unless the scenario calls for it.
- Plan for double-encrypted deliverables: prepare your public key and handoff contacts in advance.
- Budget time for retest: risk only drops when fixes are verified in practice.
What success looks like over 12–18 months
- • Shorter dwell time and faster containment every exercise.
- • Fewer viable paths from internet to high-impact assets.
- • Higher guardrail coverage (signing + verification, runner isolation, strong MFA).
- • Shorter reports with clearer fixes—because posture has improved.
Done well, red teaming is a leadership tool. It gives you a defensible, repeatable way to cut through complexity, make a small number of high-leverage changes, and watch real risk decline over time. We and our contractors and partners are here to make that practical—legally sound, safe to run, and easy to act on.