Phases and Steps of Red Teaming
Red teaming engagements typically follow a structured lifecycle designed to simulate real-world attack scenarios. While specifics may vary, most operations are divided into several key phases:
- Planning and scoping: This initial phase defines the rules of engagement. Red teamers work with stakeholders to clarify objectives, establish boundaries (e.g., systems that are off-limits), identify success criteria, and set legal and compliance parameters. Clear communication ensures that the exercise delivers value without causing unintended disruption.
- Reconnaissance: Also known as open-source intelligence (OSINT) gathering, this phase involves collecting publicly available data about the target. This can include domain names, employee contact details, organizational structure, and exposed services. The goal is to identify initial attack vectors without alerting the target.
- Initial access: Red teams attempt to gain a foothold using techniques such as phishing emails, credential stuffing, or exploiting external-facing systems. Social engineering often plays a major role here, as attackers mimic the behaviors of real adversaries to bypass security controls.
- Establishing persistence: Once inside, the red team members deploy mechanisms to maintain long-term access. This could involve setting up backdoors, creating new user accounts, or modifying configurations. Persistence allows the team to continue their operation even if the access point is discovered and shut down.
- Privilege escalation and lateral movement: Red teamers escalate their privileges by exploiting local or network vulnerabilities. They move laterally across the network to reach their objectives, such as accessing sensitive databases or domain controllers. This step tests the organization’s internal segmentation and monitoring capabilities.
- Objective completion: The team works to accomplish predefined goals—exfiltrating data, gaining domain admin access, or simulating business disruption. Success criteria are tailored to the organization's threat model and help measure defensive effectiveness.
- Reporting and debriefing: After the engagement, the red team documents all findings, including attack paths, exploited weaknesses, and missed detection opportunities. A debriefing session with the blue team and stakeholders follows. This includes a walkthrough of techniques used and recommendations for improving detection, response, and overall resilience.
Use Cases of Red Teaming
Here are a few ways organizations use red teaming to improve cyber resilience.
Threat Simulation
Red teaming provides organizations with a safe but realistic environment to simulate sophisticated cyber attacks. These simulations go beyond exploiting technical vulnerabilities to test how defenders react to evolving threats in real time. By emulating tactics used by nation-state actors, cybercriminals, or insider threats, red teams help organizations assess their readiness against high-impact attack scenarios that may not be covered by conventional testing.
These threat simulations often include multi-stage campaigns that mimic actual kill chains—starting with reconnaissance and initial access, progressing through lateral movement and privilege escalation, and culminating in data exfiltration or operational disruption. The goal is to expose weaknesses in detection, coordination, and decision-making under pressure, offering a true-to-life benchmark for evaluating and enhancing an organization's security posture.
Incident Response Validation
Red team exercise play a direct role in validating an organization’s incident response (IR) processes. By executing realistic simulated attacks, red teams offer security operations teams a way to test alerting, escalation, and containment processes under true-to-life conditions. These exercises reveal breakdowns in communication or decision-making, as well as latency between detection and decisive action.
The insights gained from IR validation exercises are critical for iterative improvement. Organizations can use findings to refine playbooks, address gaps in tooling or process, and strengthen coordination among IT, legal, and leadership stakeholders.
Testing LLM Applications
As organizations deploy large language models (LLMs) into business workflows, new security risks emerge—prompt injection, sensitive data disclosure, and unauthorized access among them. Red teaming can be applied to LLM-powered applications by simulating malicious prompts, adversarial input, or attempts to subvert model behavior. These exercises uncover design flaws in prompt handling, logging, and user permissions that traditional security tests might miss.
The stakes are especially high for enterprises integrating LLMs into customer-facing or mission-critical applications. Red teaming in this domain ensures models behave as intended even when confronted with hostile queries and that sensitive data remains protected. The process not only bolsters application security but also informs safe deployment practices and risk management strategies for generative AI systems.
Regulatory Compliance
Many regulatory frameworks—such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, and financial sector requirements—mandate testing and validation of security controls. Red teaming addresses these requirements by providing empirical evidence that organizations can detect and respond to advanced cyber threats. Regular exercises demonstrate due diligence and audit readiness, and can be tailored to test controls and processes relevant to specific mandates.
In regulated industries, compliance-focused red team assessments are particularly valuable. They help organizations stay ahead of inspection cycles, avoid penalties, and foster trust among customers and partners. By going beyond checklist compliance and demonstrating actual resilience, red teaming strengthens both regulatory posture and the overall maturity of the organization’s security program.
Key Features of Red Teaming Tools
Red teaming tools use a variety of tools to carry out their covert operations. Here are a few key capabilities these tools provide.
Automated Discovery of Assets
Automated discovery is foundational to the effectiveness of modern red teaming tools. These platforms employ reconnaissance techniques—such as network scanning, inventory enumeration, and open-source intelligence gathering—to map the target’s digital footprint with high accuracy. By automating these processes, organizations can identify unknown or forgotten assets, reducing the attack surface and minimizing blind spots.
The ability to continuously update asset inventories gives security teams a live, accurate view of their environment. This not only streamlines the preparation for red team members exercises but also helps maintain compliance and prioritization for patching or monitoring. Automated discovery features ensure that both known and shadow IT components are covered, setting the stage for threat simulations.
Social Engineering Support
Effective red teaming tools offer integrated capabilities for orchestrating social engineering campaigns, including phishing, spear-phishing, vishing, and physical pretexting. Mature platforms allow teams to design, schedule, and track campaigns, automate payload delivery, and collect statistics on target engagement and user susceptibility. These features help quantify human risk and identify areas for security awareness training.
Support for social engineering within red teaming tools boosts realism and efficiency. It enables red teams to simulate multi-stage campaigns where success in an initial human attack leads to deeper technical engagements. Automated reporting on social engineering campaigns further aids in visualizing organization-wide risk and tailoring targeted remediation efforts.
Anti-Detection
Red teaming tools are designed with anti-detection capabilities to better simulate adversaries who evade common security mechanisms. These include payload obfuscation, process injection, fileless attack methods, and automated throttling to bypass firewalls and endpoint protection. Sophisticated tools continually update their techniques in response to new security products and detection signatures.
By incorporating anti-detection measures, red teaming tools ensure test results are meaningful, reflecting real attacker success rates rather than being blocked by common security filters alone. This pushes blue teams to improve detection strategies and invest in advanced analytics or behavioral monitoring.
Reports and Dashboards
Red teaming tools collect detailed telemetry throughout an exercise, including successful attack paths, failed attempts, timeline of events, and evidence of data exfiltration. Dashboards enable aggregation and visualization of results, making it easier for stakeholders to assess impact, prioritize remediation, and measure ongoing improvement.
Clear, actionable reporting translates technical findings into business terms. This facilitates communication with executives, audit teams, and board members who need high-level overviews rather than technical minutiae. Detailed reporting also forms the foundation for compliance documentation and supports continuous improvement cycles by tracking the effectiveness of remediation efforts and defensive investments.
What Is Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART)?
Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART) delivers ongoing, autonomous simulation of attacker behavior across an organization’s environment. Unlike scheduled or one-off assessments, CART operates persistently, probing for new vulnerabilities as infrastructures evolve and attackers develop fresh techniques. This continuous approach ensures organizations do not just rely on annual snapshots, but maintain 24/7 awareness of their security posture.
CART platforms typically integrate tightly with existing security stacks, allowing automated threat simulation workflows and seamless handoff to blue and purple teams for incident validation and response. The resulting insights help organizations rapidly identify, prioritize, and remediate exposures before real attackers exploit them. By embedding red teaming into routine business operations, CART promotes a culture of proactive defense and continuous improvement.
Red Teaming and EASM
External attack surface management (EASM) and red teaming complement each other by addressing different layers of an organization’s exposure. EASM tools provide continuous visibility into internet-facing assets—including cloud instances, exposed APIs, and third-party integrations—that attackers might exploit. Red teams then use this external view to simulate how real adversaries could leverage these entry points.
Integrating EASM with red teaming enhances both processes. EASM-driven asset discovery feeds red team operations with fresh, real-world intelligence, helping teams target shadow IT, forgotten infrastructure, and misconfigurations that internal inventories may miss. Conversely, red team findings validate the accuracy and criticality of EASM results, ensuring threat modeling aligns with actual exploitation scenarios.
Together, these practices close the loop between visibility and validation. While EASM monitors the evolving perimeter, red teaming tests its resilience, helping organizations identify and secure their most exposed assets before they become entry points for attackers.
Best Practices for Successful Red Team Exercises
1. Conduct Thorough Reconnaissance
Effective red team process begins with reconnaissance. Red teamers gather technical, organizational, and human intelligence—collecting data on network layouts, employee social media activity, business operations, and technology stacks. This phase often utilizes both open-source intelligence and active probing to build a detailed roadmap of potential attack vectors.
Missing or skipping reconnaissance jeopardizes the realism and success of the engagement. Thorough preparation ensures that attack scenarios mirror actual adversary tactics, and it prevents wasted effort on dead-ends or irrelevant targets. High-quality reconnaissance also uncovers weak links often missed by automated scanners, laying the groundwork for impactful threat emulation.
2. Focus on Realistic Threat Emulation
Red teaming must closely replicate genuine threat actors, using combinations of technical exploits, social engineering, and persistence techniques seen in the wild. This involves selecting adversary profiles relevant to the organization’s industry, current threat landscape, and operational context. Effective teams tailor scenarios based on real intelligence, avoiding generic “checklist” tactics.
A focus on realism translates to meaningful, actionable insights for defenders—highlighting actual detection and response capabilities rather than theoretical ones. Mimicking up-to-date adversary behavior challenges both technical controls and human elements of security, ensuring improvements are relevant and measurably increase the organization’s resilience to attack.
3. Maintain Clear Communication Channels
Strong communication between red and blue teams underpins any successful engagement. Planning should include well-defined points of contact, escalation pathways, and deconfliction mechanisms to prevent confusion or accidental disruptions to business operations. Ongoing check-ins allow for the quick resolution of misunderstandings or resource needs as the exercise progresses.
Post-engagement briefings are equally crucial. These sessions help clarify findings, address misconceptions, and align remediation efforts. Consistent, open communication cultivates trust and collaboration between offensive and defensive teams, supporting continuous improvement and making the security function more effective and agile.
4. Document and Share Findings Effectively
Meticulous documentation throughout a red team exercise ensures lessons are preserved and acted upon. All attack paths, exploited vulnerabilities, and detection responses should be logged in a structured format, complete with timelines, proof-of-concept artifacts, and context for each action. This record forms the basis for post-engagement analysis and provides a resource for future assessments. Sharing findings in accessible, stakeholder-friendly formats is equally important.
Dashboards, executive summaries, and tailored reports translate technical outcomes into business-relevant risks and solutions, enabling leadership to make informed decisions. Effective documentation and knowledge sharing fuel ongoing training initiatives and drive organization-wide security improvements.
5. Iterate and Improve Continuously
Red teaming is most valuable when treated as an iterative process, not a one-off exercise. Lessons learned from each engagement—gaps revealed, detection failures, process bottlenecks—should be fed back into security programs. This often means reviewing and updating incident response plans, investing in new detection tools, or strengthening security awareness training.
Continuous improvement involves collaboration across red, blue, and purple teams, fostering a culture where defensive tactics evolve with the threat landscape. By regularly revisiting attack scenarios, organizations measure their progress and adjust their posture against new adversarial tactics. This cyclical approach ensures security investments yield measurable returns and that resilience steadily increases over time.
Empowering Red Teams with CyCognito
Red teams thrive when they have real-world data, unfiltered perspectives, and the ability to focus their efforts where it matters most. CyCognito was built with that philosophy at its core. By providing a continuously updated, attacker’s-eye view of the external attack surface, including assets unknown even to internal teams,CyCognito eliminates the guesswork of scoping and reconnaissance.
Using our platform, red teamers can skip hours of tedious asset mapping and zero in on exploitable paths, thanks to automated attribution, rich business context, and real-time exposure validation. This not only accelerates red team operations but ensures they're grounded in the realities of the organization’s true external risk profile.
Moreover, CyCognito helps to deliver added strategic value. By leveraging CyCognito’s risk-based prioritization and continuous black-box testing capabilities, security teams can simulate the evolving tactics of real adversaries across forgotten subsidiaries, cloud misconfigurations, and shadow IT.
This transforms red teaming from isolated exercises into an always-on, intelligence-led function—capable of feeding back into blue and purple team workflows with precision and clarity. For organizations aiming to mature their threat-informed defense strategy, this isn’t just a force multiplier—it’s a game changer.
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