Red Team Exercises

Before embarking on the initial access phase, a critical step is reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. This phase involves meticulous research and analysis to understand your organization’s digital footprint and potential vulnerabilities. It’s about mapping out your cyber landscape, identifying key assets, and understanding your security posture, setting the stage for a more focused and effective attack simulation.

In this phase, we simulate common cyber attack origins like accessing exposed systems using known and unknown vulnerabilities, leaked or weak credentials, or phishing campaigns to access your network via an employee’s computer. Our goal is to perform a realistic threat emulation and gain an initial foothold from external sources while maintaining operational continuity, applying a “leg-up” strategy if necessary.

Upon gaining network access, the focus shifts to deeper infiltration, such as compromising privileged user accounts, exploiting vulnerabilities, or targeting directory services like Active Directory.

This final phase involves simulating data exfiltration, a common cyber attack goal. It includes identifying and gathering sensitive information like trade secrets or financial data, reflecting the growing trend of double extortion in cybercrime. It can also be defined as a “flag” inside a high-value asset that the simulating attack team would try to acquire.