Red Teaming
Find out what your defenders actually catch.
A penetration test asks what's vulnerable. A red team asks whether you'd notice. We run objective-driven adversary simulations and measure how your detection and response hold up against an attacker who doesn't announce themselves.
What we cover
Every engagement is scoped to your environment — these are the areas we typically work across.
Objective-based campaigns
We agree on goals that matter to your business — reaching a critical system, accessing a sensitive dataset — and pursue them the way a real threat actor would.
Initial access
Phishing, exposed services, credential attacks, and physical entry, depending on the agreed scope and rules of engagement.
Post-exploitation
Persistence, lateral movement, and privilege escalation using realistic tradecraft designed to stay under the radar.
Detection & response measurement
Every action is logged with timestamps so your security team can see exactly what was detected, what raised an alert, and what went unnoticed.
Purple team sessions
Working side by side with your defenders after the engagement to replay techniques and tune detections against them.
What you get
- Attack narrative — the full story from initial access to objective
- Timeline of every action mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, ready to correlate with your logs
- Detection gap analysis: detected, alerted, and missed
- Prioritized recommendations for both prevention and detection
- Separate debriefs for leadership and for the security team
- Methodology
- MITRE ATT&CK and threat-informed scenarios relevant to your industry
- Timeline
- Scoped individually around objectives — usually longer than a penetration test, to allow realistic, low-and-slow tradecraft.
- Confidentiality
- NDA signed before scoping. Evidence encrypted and deleted on an agreed schedule.
Red Teaming FAQ
What's the difference between red teaming and penetration testing?
A penetration test aims to find as many vulnerabilities as possible in a defined scope. A red team pursues a specific objective by any agreed means and tests whether your people and tooling detect and respond to it.
Is our organization ready for a red team?
If you haven't had regular penetration tests or don't have security monitoring in place, start with a penetration test. A red team measures detection and response — it needs something to measure.
Who inside our company knows about the engagement?
A small control group — typically an executive sponsor and a point of contact — who authorize the work, deconflict real incidents, and can stop the engagement at any time. Everyone else stays unaware.
What stops you from causing real damage?
Rules of engagement define off-limits systems and actions, and destructive actions are never performed. If we find evidence of a real compromise during the engagement, we stop and escalate immediately.
Talk to us about Red Teaming.
Tell us what you're trying to protect. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit.
contact@ironclav.com · Response within one business day