Red Teaming

Red teaming is an advanced security exercise that goes far beyond conventional penetration testing. While penetration tests identify vulnerabilities in specific systems or applications, red team engagements test your organization's entire security program — including your security operations center's ability to detect, investigate, and respond to sophisticated attackers. A red team engagement has defined objectives — such as exfiltrating a specific sensitive dataset, achieving domain administrator access, or demonstrating physical access to a restricted area — and our team uses any available legal means to achieve those objectives over an extended period, exactly as a sophisticated real-world threat actor would.

Advanced persistent threats (APTs) do not announce themselves with noisy port scans. They conduct weeks of passive reconnaissance before making their first move. They establish persistence through multiple channels before beginning lateral movement. They live off the land, using built-in operating system tools to avoid triggering security products. They target your employees with highly customized phishing campaigns crafted using LinkedIn data and corporate communications observed during reconnaissance. Red teaming reveals whether your security controls, processes, and people can detect and respond to this patient, methodical attack style — or whether an APT would operate undetected for months.

BugFoe's red team engagements follow the MITRE ATT&CK framework, using TTPs associated with threat actor groups relevant to your industry. Engagements begin with a threat intelligence briefing to select an adversary profile appropriate to your threat model. Initial access is achieved through a combination of spear phishing, technical exploitation, and in some engagements, physical access attempts. Throughout the engagement, our team maintains detailed logs of every action taken for the final MITRE ATT&CK heat map. The engagement concludes with a purple team workshop where our red team meets with your SOC to walk through every stage of the attack, showing where detection opportunities were missed and providing specific detection engineering recommendations.