Professional Red Team Services
At Trilight Security, we provide full-scope red team services for organisations across the USA and the EU, including a strong focus on Germany. Our red team operators bring something that most offensive security firms cannot offer: hands-on experience gained in real cyberwarfare environments — working in active conflict zones where the adversary is a nation-state, not a simulated attacker, and where the consequences of failure are not a pentest report but operational reality. That operational background shapes how we approach every engagement — with the patience, stealth discipline, and adversarial creativity of operators who have faced real threat actors, not just trained against them. Get in touch with Trilight Security to discover how our red team services can validate your defences, expose gaps in your detection and response, and give your organisation a realistic picture of how it would perform under a determined attack.
Our Offering
Full Red Team Engagement
We simulate a sophisticated, persistent adversary across your entire organisation — digital, physical, and human attack surfaces — pursuing defined objectives covertly over weeks or months. Only a small number of senior stakeholders are aware the engagement is taking place. The Blue Team is not informed. We test whether your security operations, detection tooling, and incident response processes can identify and contain a real attack. The output is a narrative-driven report.
Adversary Emulation
We tailor the engagement to replicate the specific tactics, techniques, and procedures of a threat actor relevant to your organisation, industry, or geographic region — whether a financially motivated ransomware group, a state-sponsored APT, or an insider threat profile. Every technique used is mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, giving your defensive team a clear picture of which real-world actor behaviours your controls successfully detect and which they miss entirely.
Assumed Breach Scenario
We begin the engagement from a position of already established access — simulating an attacker who has already bypassed your perimeter through phishing, a supply chain compromise, or a stolen credential. This approach focuses exclusively on what an attacker can achieve once inside: privilege escalation, lateral movement, access to critical assets, data exfiltration, and persistence. It is the most efficient model to test internal detection and response capabilities.
Physical Red Team
We test the security of your physical environment alongside your digital defences — assessing whether an attacker could gain unauthorised physical access to your offices, data centres, or server rooms through tailgating, social engineering, RFID cloning, or other intrusion techniques. Physical access to a network-connected workstation or server room frequently provides the most direct path to critical infrastructure — and is the attack vector most organisations have never tested.
Purple Team Exercise
We bring the red team and your defenders together to work collaboratively — replaying attack scenarios, validating detection logic, tuning SIEM and EDR rules in real time, and translating red team findings directly into defensive improvements. Purple teaming delivers the highest immediate return from red team investment by closing the gap between offensive findings and defensive action, rather than leaving remediation to interpretation of the local team.
Social Engineering Assessment
We test the human layer of your security — the most consistently exploited attack vector in real-world compromises. Our social engineering assessments include targeted spear-phishing campaigns, vishing, physical pretexting, and multi-stage manipulation scenarios designed to test whether your employees, help desk, and contractors would provide access or information to a determined attacker posing as a trusted party.
Why Red Teaming — Not Just Penetration Testing?
Red teaming is objective-driven, designed to test how effectively your organisation can detect, respond to, and contain a sophisticated cyberattack — unlike penetration testing, which focuses on finding specific technical vulnerabilities. The distinction matters enormously in practice. A penetration test tells you which vulnerabilities exist. A red team exercise tells you whether your SOC, your EDR, your incident response team, and your people would actually stop an attacker who is using those vulnerabilities — covertly, persistently, and by any means available.
Red team engagements simulate advanced, persistent adversaries using realistic attack paths, stealth, and creativity — often over extended timeframes. These assessments are designed to test not just systems, but organisational resilience. An organisation can have every vulnerability in its infrastructure patched and still be breached through a targeted spear-phishing email, a tailgated entry to a server room, or a compromised contractor credential. Red teaming is the only assessment type that tests all three simultaneously.
For organisations with mature security programmes — established patch management, a functioning SOC, and deployed EDR — red teaming is the logical next step. A red team engagement every twelve to twenty-four months, combined with regular penetration testing, gives organisations continuous assurance that strengthens both their defences and their confidence in facing today’s evolving threats.
What We Test
Digital Attack Surface
- External perimeter — internet-facing services, VPNs, email, cloud-hosted assets
- Internal network — Active Directory, lateral movement paths, segmentation boundaries
- Endpoints — EDR bypass, living-off-the-land persistence, credential harvesting from memory
- Cloud environments — AWS, Azure, GCP identity and IAM privilege escalation
- Web and API-facing applications — as initial access vectors, not as the primary test objective
- Supply chain and third-party access paths.
Human Attack Surface
- Spear-phishing — targeted, custom-crafted campaigns using OSINT-derived intelligence about named individuals
- Vishing — telephone pretexting targeting help desk, IT staff, and employees with privileged access
- Smishing — SMS-based social engineering where in scope
- Pretexting — multi-stage scenarios building trust over time before requesting access or credentials
- Insider threat simulation — testing whether unusual access patterns by a privileged user would be detected
Physical Attack Surface
- Tailgating and social engineering of reception and security staff
- RFID credential cloning and replay
- Unlocked workstation and unattended device access
- Server room and data centre physical access attempts
- USB drop and hardware implant deployment testing
Red Team Engagement Process
Our engagements follow a structured but flexible methodology adapted to the specific threat model, objectives, and environment of each client. A full-scope red team engagement typically covers the following phases:
- Intelligence Gathering & Reconnaissance: We conduct extensive passive and active reconnaissance — mapping your external attack surface, identifying employees and organisational relationships through OSINT, enumerating exposed services, reviewing publicly available technical assets, and profiling the individuals most likely to be targeted in social engineering scenarios. This phase is conducted entirely covertly and produces the target intelligence that drives every subsequent phase.
- Initial Access: We attempt to achieve a foothold in your environment through whatever vector the reconnaissance phase identifies as most viable — spear-phishing with custom lures, credential stuffing against exposed authentication interfaces, exploitation of public-facing vulnerabilities, physical intrusion, vishing, supply chain partner access, or any combination. We use multiple simultaneous vectors where the rules of engagement permit, replicating how sophisticated threat actors genuinely operate.
- Establishment of Persistence: Once initial access is achieved, we establish covert, durable persistence using techniques designed to survive reboots, password resets, and standard remediation actions — including living-off-the-land techniques that blend with legitimate administrative activity and are specifically designed to evade EDR and SIEM detection. This phase tests whether your monitoring capabilities would identify an attacker who has been inside your environment for weeks.
- Privilege Escalation: We systematically work from our initial access position — typically a low-privilege user or endpoint — toward the highest-value access in the environment: domain administrator, cloud account root access, privileged service accounts, and access to your crown-jewel systems and data. Every escalation path is documented with the techniques used and the controls that did or did not detect the activity.
- Lateral Movement: We move across your network toward defined objectives — pivoting between systems and segments, abusing trust relationships, exploiting misconfigurations, and crossing network boundaries that are assumed to contain an attacker. This phase specifically tests your network segmentation, internal monitoring, and east-west detection capabilities.
- Objective Achievement: We pursue the specific objectives agreed at scoping — which typically represent the business impact an attacker would most seek to achieve: access to sensitive data, manipulation of critical systems, takeover of financial processing infrastructure, exfiltration of intellectual property, or deployment of simulated ransomware payloads. Reaching an objective generates the most compelling executive-level evidence that a real attack would have succeeded.
- Reporting & Debrief: We produce a full narrative report of the engagement — documenting every step of the attack path, every technique used with MITRE ATT&CK mappings, what your defences detected and what they missed, and specific, prioritised recommendations for both technical remediation and defensive improvement. The report is structured for both technical teams and executive and board-level audiences. We conduct a full debrief with your security leadership, and optionally a separate technical debrief with your SOC and incident response team.
Our Benefits
Experts with Unique Expertise
Several members of our blue team have served in cyber units operating in different conflict environments. That experience is not a credential you can obtain from a training course. It shapes the way our operators think, plan, and adapt during attacks —based on the understanding of how sophisticated adversaries genuinely behave.
Top Certifications
Our red team holds the highest offensive security certifications in the industry including OSCE, OSCP, OSEP, CRTO, CRTE, eCPPT, CREST, and others — combined with the operational experience that no certification programme fully replicates, the last asset being the most valuable and productive in our red, purple and blue team engagements.
Rich Deliverables
We produce narrative-driven red team reports that tell the story of the attack from first contact to objective achievement — mapping every technique to MITRE ATT&CK, documenting every detection gap, and providing prioritised recommendations for both technical remediation and SOC/IR improvement.
Fully Bespoke Engagements
Every red team engagement is built from scratch around your specific threat model, industry, and objectives. We do not run canned attack scripts or recycled scenarios. The TI, initial access vectors, and attack objectives for your engagement are determined by who would realistically attack your organisation.
Red Team Methodologies
Our engagements are structured around the MITRE ATT&CK Framework for adversary emulation — mapping all techniques, tactics, and procedures to the ATT&CK matrix to give your defensive team a precise picture of which real-world actor behaviours your controls detect and which they miss. Engagement structure follows the PTES (Penetration Testing Execution Standard) for overall scoping and governance, supplemented by TIBER-EU principles for threat intelligence-led targeting. Physical security testing follows established physical penetration testing frameworks. Social engineering assessments follow structured pretexting and phishing methodologies aligned to real-world threat actor tradecraft.
For regulated engagements — particularly DORA TLPT, financial sector exercises, and compliance-driven red team programmes — we apply the full TIBER-EU framework and DORA TLPT RTS requirements. Our red team engagements can serve as the red team component of a DORA-compliant TLPT engagement for financial entities in scope of Article 26.
Tools
Our red team toolset is selected and configured to accurately replicate the TTPs of real threat actors — with particular emphasis on stealth, EDR evasion, and living-off-the-land techniques that produce minimal forensic noise. Command and control infrastructure uses Cobalt Strike and Havoc. Post-exploitation and lateral movement use Metasploit, Impacket, CrackMapExec (NetExec), and custom tooling developed for specific target environments. Active Directory attack paths use BloodHound, SharpHound, Rubeus, and Mimikatz. OSINT and reconnaissance use Maltego, SpiderFoot, Amass, and Subfinder. Physical intrusion testing uses RFID cloning hardware, custom hardware implants, and specialist lock bypass tooling. All techniques and tools are fully documented in the red team report with MITRE ATT&CK mappings and detection recommendations for your defensive team.
Our Certifications
Deliverables
- Executive Summary: A board-level summary of the engagement — what objectives were achieved, what the equivalent real-world business impact would have been, and the three to five most critical improvements required.
- Full Attack Narrative: A chronological, step-by-step account of the complete attack path from initial access to objective achievement — written to be understood by both technical and non-technical audiences, with timestamps, screenshots, and evidence at every stage.
- MITRE ATT&CK Heat Map: A visual mapping of every technique used during the engagement against the ATT&CK matrix, showing which techniques were detected, which triggered alerts, and which passed through undetected — giving your SOC a precise tuning roadmap.
- Detection Gap Analysis: A structured analysis of what your SIEM, EDR, and monitoring tools detected versus what they missed at each phase of the engagement, with specific recommended detection rules, log sources, and alerting thresholds for each gap.
- Technical Findings Report: Full technical documentation of every vulnerability and misconfiguration exploited during the engagement, with CVSS severity ratings and specific remediation guidance.
- Evidence Package: All screenshots, command outputs, traffic captures, and artefacts from the engagement — providing a reproducible record of every technique executed.
- Remediation Roadmap: Prioritised by business impact — distinguishing between quick-win defensive improvements (detection rule additions, EDR policy changes) and longer-term architectural changes (network segmentation, identity programme improvements).
- SOC/IR Debrief Materials: A structured debrief pack for your SOC and incident response team — documenting the precise timeline of the attack, what signals were visible in your logs at each stage, and what a well-tuned detection programme would have alerted on.
Penetration Test Report Sample
Penetration testing is a must for any business using digital services. We use different comprehensive tools, methodologies, and models for pentesting. DOWNLOAD our penetration test report sample and learn more.
FAQ
Red teaming is a realistic, objective-driven simulation of a sophisticated cyberattack against your entire organisation — testing not just your technical controls, but your people, physical security, and the ability of your defenders to detect and respond to a real adversary. Unlike penetration testing, which systematically finds technical vulnerabilities in defined systems, a red team engagement asks a different question: would we actually stop a determined attacker.
Penetration testing identifies technical vulnerabilities in a defined scope — a web application, a network segment, a set of endpoints. A red team engagement simulates a full attack campaign against your entire organisation, including social engineering, physical intrusion, and multi-stage lateral movement, with the Blue Team unaware the test is happening. The output of a pentest is a vulnerability list. The output of a red team exercise is a narrative of how far an attacker got, what your defences detected, and what they missed.
Red teaming delivers the most value when an organisation has already addressed its baseline technical hygiene — has patch management in place, has deployed EDR, and has a functioning SOC or security monitoring capability. If your environment has large numbers of unpatched systems and no active monitoring, a penetration test will surface the same issues more efficiently. If your environment is reasonably well-hardened and the question is whether your defenders would detect and contain a real attack, red teaming is the right investment.
Only the individuals designated as the Control Team — typically two or three senior security or risk stakeholders — are aware that an engagement is in progress. The Security Operations Centre, IT team, and other employees are not informed. This is essential because one of the primary objectives of a red team exercise is to test whether your existing detection and response capabilities would identify a real attack. If defenders are aware of the test, that question cannot be answered.
The most frequently successful initial access vectors in our engagements are spear-phishing targeting named individuals identified through OSINT, credential stuffing against cloud identity providers and VPNs, exploitation of exposed or under-monitored internet-facing services, and social engineering of help desk and IT staff. Once inside, the most common escalation paths involve Active Directory misconfigurations, overprivileged service accounts, and cloud IAM privilege escalation. Physical intrusion succeeds more often than most organisations expect — particularly in environments where visitor management and tailgating controls have not been recently tested.
Yes. Physical security is one of the most underestimated and undertested attack vectors — and one where our team’s background in operational security environments provides a genuine advantage. Physical intrusion testing is available as a component of full-scope red team engagements or as a standalone physical security assessment. All physical testing is conducted within explicitly agreed rules of engagement to ensure safety and legal compliance.
A standard red team exercise pursues defined objectives using the most effective techniques available. Adversary emulation constrains the engagement further — requiring our operators to replicate the specific TTPs of a named threat actor, such as a particular APT group or ransomware affiliate, to test whether your defences would specifically detect and contain that adversary’s behaviour. Adversary emulation is particularly valuable for organisations in sectors with known, specific threat actor profiles — financial services, critical infrastructure, defence supply chain, and healthcare.
An assumed breach exercise begins from a position of already established internal access — simulating an attacker who has bypassed the perimeter through a phished employee, a compromised supply chain partner, or a stolen credential. This approach allows us to focus the entire engagement on what an attacker can achieve once inside your environment: how far they can move, what they can access, whether your internal monitoring would detect them, and whether your incident response team could contain them. It is the most efficient model for testing internal resilience without the time investment of a full external access phase.
Purple teaming is a collaborative exercise in which the red team and your defenders work together — replaying attack techniques, observing whether they trigger alerts, tuning detection rules in real time, and building your Blue Team’s capability to identify the specific techniques your environment is most vulnerable to. Purple teaming delivers the fastest improvement in detection capability per unit of investment and is particularly valuable after a red team engagement — translating the findings into measurable defensive improvements rather than leaving remediation to a report.
Full-scope red team engagements typically run from four to twelve weeks of active testing, preceded by a reconnaissance and planning phase. Shorter, targeted engagements — assumed breach scenarios, social engineering assessments, or adversary emulation against a specific objective — can be scoped to two to four weeks. We provide a detailed scoping estimate after an initial call to understand your environment, objectives, and security maturity.
Our red team engagements follow the MITRE ATT&CK Framework for adversary emulation and technique mapping, PTES for overall engagement governance, and TIBER-EU principles for threat intelligence-led targeting. For financial sector entities with DORA TLPT obligations, our red team can serve as the Red Team Tester component of a fully compliant TLPT engagement under Commission Delegated Regulation EU 2025/1190.
Pricing depends on the scope of the engagement, the attack vectors included (digital only, with social engineering, with physical), the duration of active testing, and whether adversary emulation or TIBER-EU/TLPT compliance documentation is required. Red team engagements represent the most intensive form of security testing — and the most realistic measure of whether your organisation would survive a real attack. Contact us for a detailed, obligation-free scoping call and budget estimate.
Our Recognition
