Simulate real threats and outmaneuver the adversaries.
Obtain valuable insight into your strengths and exploitable weaknesses with a Red Teaming Services.
Obtain valuable insight into your strengths and exploitable weaknesses with a Red Teaming Services.
Red Team services simulate an actual, relevant threat to your organization. These exercises focus on objectives and stealth-oriented attacks, allowing for an open-ended approach tailored to your organization. A Red Team consulting engagement may test against not just the technical, but also the human and physical elements of your organization’s cybersecurity.
Your network is only as secure as its most easily accessible machine or its weakest physical access control. Engaging in the Red Team services and exercises helps you understand your strengths, vulnerabilities and how to stop your adversaries.
Discover how combining red and purple teaming can expose blind spots, improve detection, and elevate your security posture. Hear real-world stories and practical tips from our offensive security consultants.
No two Red Team exercises are alike, but we do approach them all in a similar, reliable manner to minimize risk and maximize benefit. Our Red Teaming services are broken into the following phases:
We work with you to determine your goals, objectives and scope of the Red Team. What we determine, together, in this phase will influence the rest of the engagement. Based on our collaboration, we research which known threat actor is most likely to target your organization, and build the engagement to emulate their Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs).
Because these exercises are performed without prior information (“black box” testing), we gather as much in-scope information as possible on your network, physical and human footprints. This allows us to create an attack plan that emulates the threat actors' attack path. This reconnaissance is accomplished through both passive and active information gathering techniques.
Our team covertly attempts to gain access to your systems using information gathered during the reconnaissance phase. We take this information and perform a vulnerability analysis in which the attack surface is mapped to relevant TTPs from MITRE’s ATT&CK framework. Based on this analysis, we enact and carry out several TTPs based on your organization’s attack surface.
Our team uses various C2 platforms (both commercially-available and developed in-house) to covertly maintain access to your network and systems. We malform our shellcode enough to defeat most anti-virus solutions and use this access to capture credentials, move laterally, escalate privileges and reach sensitive data. The techniques used here are again limited only to your organization’s attack surface, and our team is experienced with scenarios in this phase including sensitive data exfiltration, ransomware proof-of-concept (POC) testing and internally-based social engineering attacks.
We create an After-Action Debrief that analyzes every phase of execution leading up to the accomplishment of each completed objective. Our goal is to ensure your team understands why something was vulnerable or abused, and how they can fix it. Together, we’ll review our detailed findings, severities and recommendations for fixes. A formalized report will be provided and our team will maintain a regular meeting cadence to review in-progress items and discuss upcoming objectives.
Red teaming plays a critical role in AI security by stress-testing AI systems against real-world misuse scenarios before and after deployment. This includes adversarial testing of how models respond to malicious inputs, evaluating whether AI tools can be manipulated to bypass security controls or leak sensitive data, and assessing the risks introduced when third-party AI tools are integrated into your environment. As AI becomes embedded in more business-critical processes, red teaming provides the validation layer that governance policies alone cannot. It moves AI security from theoretical risk management to demonstrated, evidence-based assurance.
Penetration testing is a scoped, time-boxed exercise focused on finding and validating as many vulnerabilities as possible within a defined target. A red team engagement simulates a threat actor targeting your organization with specific objectives, using stealth and an open-ended attack path rather than comprehensive coverage. Where a penetration test asks "what vulnerabilities exist," a red team exercise asks "how far could a motivated adversary actually get, and would we even detect them?" Red teaming also extends beyond technical systems to test human and physical security controls as well. Typically a penetration test will last one to two weeks based on the scope of an engagement, while a red team will be scoped significantly longer, over a month long in some cases.
Look for a vendor that builds each engagement around your organization's actual threat landscape rather than running a generic exercise. A strong red team partner will research which known threat actors are most likely to target your industry and emulate their specific tactics, techniques, and procedures rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Ask about their methodology across all phases, from reconnaissance through post-exploitation, and confirm they use both commercially available and custom-developed tooling. Equally important is what happens after the exercise. The debrief and reporting process should ensure your technical and leadership teams both walk away understanding what was found, why it mattered, and what to fix first.
Red teaming is most valuable for organizations that have already invested in security controls and want to validate whether those controls actually hold up against a realistic attack. This includes organizations in regulated industries, companies that have completed penetration testing and want a more advanced evaluation, and any organization where a breach would carry significant operational, financial, or reputational consequences. Red teaming is also well-suited for organizations that want to test not just their technology but also the full scope of their defensive strategies and controls.
Effective red teaming draws from the full MITRE ATT&CK framework and tailors techniques to the target organization's specific attack surface. Core techniques typically include passive and active reconnaissance to map the network, physical, and human footprint; exploitation of technical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations; post-exploitation activities like lateral movement, privilege escalation, and credential capture; and covert persistence using command-and-control infrastructure. Advanced engagements may also include ransomware proof-of-concept testing, sensitive data exfiltration simulations, and internally-based social engineering to evaluate detection and response across every layer of the organization.
Echelon builds every red team engagement around your organization specifically. That starts in planning, where we work with you to define objectives and research which threat actors are most likely to target your industry, and it carries through to the after-action debrief, where we make sure your team understands not just what happened but why and what to do about it. Our team uses both commercially available and custom-developed tooling, tests across technical, human, and physical attack surfaces, and maintains a regular meeting cadence through remediation to keep progress on track. For SMBs that want more than a checkbox exercise, we deliver engagements that reflect real threats and produce results your team can actually act on.
Penetration testing and red teaming draw from overlapping toolsets but deploy them very differently. In a penetration test, tools are used broadly to identify and validate as many vulnerabilities as possible within scope. In a red team exercise, tooling is selected and deployed to achieve a specific goal or goals, while maintaining good operational security and avoiding detection. Red team operations typically involve custom or modified payloads designed to defeat various detection and prevention solutions, C2 infrastructure for persistent covert access, and a combination of technical, social engineering, and physical techniques. The distinction is less about which tools are used and more about how and why they are deployed.