What is a Red Team?
A Red Team is a group of (internal or external) security professionals that behaves like a real attacker in order to test an organisation’s resilience to cyber threats in a realistic way.
The aim of a Red Team is not only to find vulnerabilities, but above all to test how well the organisation detects, responds to and recovers from a realistic attack.
See also Blue Team
🧠 What does a Red Team do?
A Red Team:
- Simulates real attackers such as hackers, insiders or APTs
- Uses MITRE ATT&CK techniques
- Carries out controlled attacks such as Phishing, lateral movement and privilege escalation
- Tests not just technology, but processes and people too
- Avoids unnecessary damage (rules and scope are agreed in advance)
🧪 Red Team vs. other forms of testing
| Type | Aim | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Red Team | Testing resilience and detection | Realistic, stealthy, end-to-end |
| Blue Team | Defending systems | SOC, SIEM, EDR, logging, response |
| Purple Team | Cooperation between Red and Blue | Learning, improving, sharing insights |
| Pentest | Finding vulnerabilities | Short, focused, often only technical |
| Vulnerability scan | Automated detection of known weaknesses | No human interpretation |
🔧 Examples of Red Team actions
- Sending convincing Phishing emails
- Breaking in through poorly secured external assets
- Exploiting misconfigurations (e.g. open S3 buckets or SMB shares)
- Establishing persistence via scheduled tasks or registry keys
- Communicating with Command and Control (C2) servers
🛡 What is tested?
- The detection capability of the SOC or SIEM
- Incident response processes and playbooks
- Human behaviour (clicking on phishing, reporting suspicious activity)
- The effectiveness of Defense in Depth
- Real-time interplay between technology, policy and awareness
✅ Aim and benefits
- A realistic stress test of your security capabilities
- Proves whether security measures actually work in practice
- Identifies blind spots and unknown weaknesses
- Supports compliance and maturity assessments (e.g. ISO 27001, NIS2)
📌 In summary
A Red Team tests your organisation as a real attacker would — focused, stealthy and realistic. It helps you to learn, improve and build a resilient organisation that is not just reactive, but also proactive.