Red Teaming Services
Experience realistic threat simulations to uncover vulnerabilities and strengthen your cyber security defences
Expert-led red teaming services to expose vulnerabilities and enhance your security posture
The increasing speed, scale, and sophistication of cyber threats demand a proactive and advanced security approach. Red teaming, through real-world attack simulations, allows your organisation to understand how well your defences withstand genuine attacks. Our Red Teaming services identify vulnerabilities that standard testing might miss, empowering you to strengthen your cyber security effectively.
Our Red Teaming Services
Red teaming goes beyond threat prevention to encompass alerting, response, and an assessment of detection. In typical penetration tests, the blue team is aware in advance of the timing of the procedure. In a red teaming engagement, the effectiveness of the blue teams’ defensive capabilities and their response to real-world actors are challenged and measured.
Reconnaissance
Gathering intelligence on your organisation’s systems and potential entry points, simulating how attackers might discover weaknesses.
Exploitation
Attempting to breach your defences using the information gathered, just as an attacker would, to expose vulnerabilities.
Lateral movement
Simulating an intruder’s behaviour inside your network to test your internal security measures and their effectiveness.
Exfiltration
Simulating data extraction to assess your organisation’s ability to detect and respond to breaches effectively.
Benefits of Red Teaming
If your organisation is trying to accurately measure and enhance its readiness to detect and respond to a cyber-attack, then red teaming is advised. Conducting red team testing will help you to:
• Gain a holistic view of your organisation’s cyber security maturity.
• Exercise your organisation’s defensive capabilities against real-world adversaries.
• Increase confidence in the assumptions you have regarding your security posture.
• Validate investment in security across people, processes, and technology.
• Understand the true impact a security breach would have on your organisation.
• Measure the effectiveness of your blue team’s defensive capabilities and fill any gaps.
Our approach to Red Teaming
Threat intelligence-based scenario building
The scenario creation phase typically takes the form of a risk workshop, attended by key stakeholders in your organisation and the Red Team.
During this session, there will be a debrief of the threat intelligence (TI) detailing which threat actors are deemed to be most likely to target the organisation and a brief overview of the tactics and techniques which the threat actors have been seen to utilise. This information is then used to construct the scenarios to be played out during the next phase of the engagement.
We work with you to determine target systems. We have a robust and mature risk management methodology for testing live production environments. Paramount to this approach is a collaborative style to safeguard organisations and their interests while ensuring communication throughout.
During the workshop, we will work with you to introduce ‘fail-safes’ and additional controls to manage the engagement.
Simulated targeted testing
This phase constitutes the bulk of the testing, and our Red Team will execute the agreed scenarios. The team will work through the cyber kill chain in a cyclical methodology which will allow for the testing of people, processes and technology within your organisation, resulting in an accurate assessment of your defensive capability.
We make use of bespoke capabilities that simulate actions and attack methods of sophisticated threat actors. This unique tooling
allows for the use of a vast range of techniques and the simulation of a range of threat actors. The Red Team will customise the tooling to fit the individual scenario and the threat actor being simulated.
As the engagement progresses, we work towards gaining access to the defined objectives. This is typically achieved by cycling through the cyber kill chain until it is in a position where sufficient intelligence and privilege have been achieved to allow for access to the target systems.
All actions taken throughout the engagement will be logged and used during an optional Detection and Response Assessment (DRA).
Detection and Response Assessment
We offer a post-engagement workshop to assess and collaborate with the defensive teams’ actions and gain complete insight into how your organisation defends against threats. We provide robust tactical and strategic advice, helping shape the future actions and road map for your security teams.
We have developed custom questions aligned to the NIST Cyber Security Framework (CSF) to gain a holistic overview of your organisation’s defensive posture. Once fully sighted on these defences, we work alongside your teams to establish their timeline of events. This will then be compared with the timeline constructed by our Red Team to accurately establish potential areas of defensive improvement.
We work through any detections and subsequent response actions to help determine how effective, repeatable, and scalable the actions and surrounding processes were. This allows us to align any detections or alerts back to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
Based on the information ascertained in this session, you can map out areas of current strengths and weaknesses. This allows you to fully understand your current security posture and create a roadmap for areas of focus.
Award-winning expertise
Our cyber security team continues to achieve multiple vendor certifications, highly respected industry accreditations and international accolades, demonstrating the breadth, depth and impact of their services.
Why work with us?
Specialist expertise
Our cyber security experts hold multiple vendor certifications and accreditations as well as highly respected industry accreditations from CREST, the PCI SSC, ISC2, BCI, Chartered Institute of IT, and NCSC CHECK.
Industry leadership
We lead and shape industry on advisory boards and councils including the PCI SSC Global Executive Assessor Roundtable and CREST councils in the Americas, Asia, EMEA and the UK. We are certified by a range of governing bodies including the payment card industry and are approved as a Qualified Security Assessor.
Everywhere you are
Operating in over 55 countries, with more than 250 dedicated cyber security specialists and over 300 highly qualified information security auditors across the world, we can provide a local service with a globally consistent dedication to excellence.
Award winners
We have been recognised for the breadth and depth of our services – including the TEISS Award for Best Penetration Testing Service in 2024, Enterprise Threat Detection and Cloud Security awards at the Security Excellence Awards 2024 and the Stratus Award for Best Managed Cloud Security Service.
Partner with LRQA
• Our team possesses a unique blend of offensive and defensive technical expertise, with a deep understanding of business impact and risk.
• We deliver red teaming engagements that meet the highest standards in line with global regulatory frameworks, including CBEST, iCAST, STAR-FS, and TIBER-EU.
• Each Red Team engagement includes a technical lead, a Red Team member, and an attack manager, ensuring decisions are made based on a robust risk management approach.
• We leverage a dedicated Research and Development (R&D) team to develop bespoke tools, allowing us to simulate a wide range of threat actors, from simple hacktivists to sophisticated cybercriminal groups.
The world leader in CREST accreditations
We are proud to be the only organisation in the world with a full suite of accreditations from The Council of Registered Ethical Security Testers (CREST).
Our team of consultants have achieved the highest accreditations for Penetration Testing, Red Teaming, Incident Response services and Threat Intelligence. In addition, we were also the first organisation to be CREST accredited for our Security Operation Centre services.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Red Teaming?
Red teaming is a covert assessment that allows organisations to simulate real-world threats to assess how well their people, processes, and technologies (PPT) would stand up to a determined adversary. A large focus of red teaming engagements is not simply whether an adversary can breach the perimeter, but what will happen when they do.
How long does a typical Red Teaming engagement last?
The duration of a red teaming engagement can vary depending on the scope, objectives, and complexity of the organisation’s environment. Generally, engagements can last anywhere from a few weeks to several months. This timeframe allows the Red Team to conduct thorough reconnaissance, simulate realistic attack scenarios, and analyse the results to provide actionable insights. The goal is to ensure a comprehensive assessment that accurately reflects how your organisation would fare against real-world cyber threats.
Providing Security Testing to a leading UK financial investment company
This client had previously experienced a high number of vulnerabilities, from which LRQA was able to help. The services implemented provided the client with a proactive and threat-led approach; informed by our offensive and threat intelligence teams to protect against the latest industry threats.
View case study