Red teaming that tests whether you’d actually stop an attack.
Objective-led red team exercises that test your people, processes and technology together — showing whether your organisation would detect and respond to a realistic, intelligence-led attack.
A penetration test finds vulnerabilities. A red team tests your defences.
Penetration tests are designed to find as many weaknesses as possible in a defined scope. Red teaming asks a different question: could a realistic attacker achieve a specific objective without being stopped — and would your team notice?
Our red team exercises emulate the tactics, techniques and procedures of relevant threat actors, informed by our threat intelligence work. They test your detection, response and decision-making as much as your technology.
People, process and technology.
Scenarios are built around objectives that matter to your business.
Threat intelligence
Scenarios based on the actors and techniques most relevant to your organisation.
Initial access
Realistic routes in, such as phishing, exposed services or compromised credentials.
Social engineering
Testing how people and processes respond to targeted manipulation, where in scope.
Persistence & evasion
Whether an attacker could establish a foothold without being detected.
Lateral movement
Movement through your environment towards agreed objectives.
Objectives
Agreed goals — such as access to client data or payment systems — that demonstrate impact.
Detection
Which attacker actions your security monitoring detects, and how quickly.
Response
How your team, processes and providers respond under realistic conditions.
Purple teaming
Working with your defenders afterwards to replay the attack and improve detection.
How we test.
AI-assisted speed for the repetitive work. Senior, manual testing for judgement, exploitation and evidence.
Plan
Agree objectives, scenarios, rules of engagement and a control group.
Intelligence
Build scenarios from relevant threat intelligence.
Execute
Emulate the attack, stealthily, towards the agreed objectives.
Replay
Purple team the attack with your defenders.
Report
Attack narrative, detection gaps and improvement plan.
Choose the right starting point.
Full red team
End-to-end, objective-led exercise from initial access, with minimal knowledge in your organisation.
Assumed-breach red team
Starting from a compromised user, focusing time on detection and response inside your environment.
Purple team exercise
Collaborative, transparent testing with your defenders to validate and improve detection.
Evidence you can act on — and share.
Executive summary
Plain-English risk, business impact and priorities for leadership and boards.
Attack paths
How individual weaknesses chain together into real-world impact.
Technical findings
Evidence, CVSS scoring and specific, practical remediation for every finding.
Live findings
Findings published to the SMARTSEC client platform as the engagement runs.
Retest
Independent revalidation of fixes, with retest terms agreed in the statement of work.
Debrief
A walkthrough of the results with your technical team and stakeholders.
What we typically find.
Examples of the issue types this kind of test regularly uncovers — illustrative, not client data.
- Initial access through phishing or exposed services
- Attacker activity that generates no alerts
- Alerts raised but not escalated or acted on in time
- Privilege escalation through Active Directory weaknesses
- Access to critical data or systems through legitimate tools
- Gaps between security providers and internal teams
- Incident response plans that break down in practice
- Weak controls over sensitive business processes
Evidence for the people who ask.
- Boards and regulators — evidence of how the organisation would perform against a realistic attack.
- FCA operational resilience — severe but plausible cyber scenarios tested end to end.
- Security investment — objective evidence of what your detection and response actually achieve.
- DORA TLPT and TIBER-EU — for these regulated tests we act as the independent threat intelligence provider, separate from the red team.
Red teaming questions.
What is red teaming?
An objective-led exercise that emulates a realistic attacker to test whether your organisation can prevent, detect and respond to an attack — covering people, processes and technology together.
What is 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 exercise pursues specific objectives, often stealthily, to test detection and response.
Who knows about the exercise?
Only a small control group in your organisation, so the response of your defenders is realistic. Rules of engagement and safety controls are agreed in advance.
Do you include social engineering?
Where it is in scope and agreed with you, social engineering such as targeted phishing can be included.
How long does a red team exercise take?
Red team exercises are scoped individually based on objectives and scenarios, and typically run over several weeks.
Can you act as the red team for a DORA TLPT or TIBER-EU test?
For DORA TLPT and TIBER-EU, we act as the independent threat intelligence provider. The frameworks separate this role from the red team provider.
Want to know if you’d stop a real attack?
Tell us what you want to test and we’ll design an objective-led exercise around it.