The term red team is sparking interest in the world of computer security: what exactly does it mean, how does it work, and why is it useful? In this article, we’ll clearly and comprehensively explain what it is, its advantages, its limitations, and how it fits into a modern defense strategy like the one we offer at Enthec with our Kartos solution.
Before diving in, it’s a good idea to learn a little about Kartos: it’s a cyber surveillance solution designed for businesses that seeks to offer Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM). In other words, Kartos helps you permanently identify weak points in your infrastructure, prioritize the most dangerous ones, and ensure that vulnerabilities don’t reappear.
What is a red team?
A red team is a specialized team that simulates the role of a real attacker to test an organization’s security. Rather than just performing spot tests, their approach seeks to replicate advanced techniques, combining technical, human, and sometimes physical methods to determine if an adversary could compromise critical assets without being detected.
In the cybersecurity sector, “red teaming” means turning those simulations into intentional and structured exercises, with defined objectives, clear rules, and mechanisms to learn from the results.
Unlike a routine vulnerability audit or scan, a red team seeks to emulate how a real attacker, with the resources, skills, and patience, would attempt to infiltrate, hide, move laterally, and achieve a goal (e.g., exfiltrate data).
A red team executes an adversary emulation exercise on a network, system, or IT environment to identify critical flaws and gaps that are difficult to detect using other methods.
Red teaming vs. penetration testing (pentesting)
It is common to confuse red team with pentesting, but there are key differences:
- Pentesting is usually more limited in time or scope, focusing on finding specific known vulnerabilities.
- The red team, on the other hand, is more free and prolonged, aimed at seeing if an attacker can achieve a fundamental objective, not just list faults.
- Red teaming also assesses the detection and response capabilities of internal teams, not just the presence of vulnerabilities.
- The red team often operates without warning or with minimal visibility to simulate real-life conditions.
A red team exercise can last weeks, involve multiple vectors (email, remote access, phishing, deception, social engineering), and conclude with a report detailing the progress made, the detections, and the defensive flaws that need to be addressed.
How a red team works: typical stages
To better understand this, I’ll break down the typical phases of a red team exercise:
1. Definition of objectives and scope
Before attacking, the intended targets are agreed upon (e.g., accessing sensitive data, gaining administrator access, leaking information), and systems are evaluated as either within or outside the perimeter (what is excluded). Rules of engagement are also established to prevent unwanted damage.
2. Reconnaissance/intelligence
The team gathers public, internal, or compromised information about the organization: domains, employees, networks, exposed services… This allows for the construction of realistic attack scenarios.
3. Initial exploitation/entry point
Here, the red team uses vulnerabilities, phishing, weak credentials, or social engineering to gain a foothold within the target network. This involves gaining initial access without being detected.
4. Persistent access and lateral movement
Once inside, the simulated attacker escalates privileges, moves laterally, explores the network, searches for other vulnerable systems, and moves toward the defined target.
5. Goal achievement / final scenario
The red team, if successful, carries out the planned scenario: data extraction, maintaining a hidden presence, etc.
6. Report and recommendations
The team delivers a report with findings, attack routes used, points where attacks were stopped or detected, and recommendations for correcting weaknesses.
7. Correction and validation phase
Recommendations are reviewed, issues are corrected or mitigated, and in some cases, a subsequent verification (light re-red teaming) is performed to confirm that the improvements have been practical.
These stages allow us to understand not only where there are vulnerabilities, but also how an intelligent attacker would exploit them in a real-life environment.
Advantages of the red team within a CTEM strategy
Incorporating red teaming as part of a CTEM strategy brings benefits that go beyond simple fault finding:
- Dynamic visibility: With red teaming, you discover how holes interact with each other and how they might combine to form critical attack paths.
- Realistic prioritization: It is not enough to fix all the bugs; you have to know which ones can actually be exploited.
- Continuous evaluation of defenses: Helps test detection, alerts, and response capabilities.
- Culture of constant improvement: Encourages security and operations teams to advance and evolve.
When integrated with a platform like Kartos, red teaming becomes part of the CTEM cycle, as it is not a one-off exercise but rather an ongoing process of monitoring exposure to threats.
Furthermore, by being part of a CTEM framework, the red team’s results are automatically fed back: new findings are integrated into the platform, prioritized based on their impact and risk, and periodic measurements are taken to verify that exposure is being reduced. This is the core of the Continuous Threat Exposure Management approach.
Limits and risks of the red team
Although the red team is very valuable, it’s not a perfect or magic solution. It’s essential to understand its limitations:
- Cost and time: these exercises often require specialized human resources and extended deadlines. Not all organizations have the budget for frequent red teaming.
- Partial coverage: An exercise cannot attack all possible systems, environments, or vectors, so there are “blind spots” in areas.
- Risk of interruptions: If not well planned, the simulated attack could cause failures or overloads in production systems.
- Limited in time: The threat landscape is changing; what works today may not work tomorrow. That’s why red teaming, as a stand-alone exercise, is no substitute for ongoing vigilance.
For all these reasons, a good approach is to use red teaming in combination with other forms of assessment (continuous analysis, automated scans, more frequent simulations) within a CTEM framework.
How Kartos fits into this equation
Here is Enthec with its Kartos tool, a CTEM platform that allows:
- Integrate the red team’s results into the ongoing exposure vision.
- Prioritize detected risks based on impact, probability, and complete attack paths.
- Monitor whether the proposed fixes have actually been applied or whether errors reappear.
- Automate alerts, reports, and follow-up tasks to maintain a secure posture over time.
Good practices for successfully using Red Team
For a red team exercise to truly deliver value, it’s recommended to follow these practices:
- Define clear, realistic, and business-aligned objectives.
- Establish strict rules of engagement (what can be touched, what can’t, what levels of risk do you accept).
- Maintain secrecy or controlled visibility (depending on the purpose).
- Involve the internal response team, at least in the reporting and correction phase.
- Incorporate lessons learned into the CTEM cycle so that they are not isolated.
- Repeat with partial frequency (for example, with minor exercises) to prevent the organization from settling.
- Measure its effectiveness with detection times, percentage of compromises detected, improvements after corrections, etc.
With these practices, red teaming ceases to be an isolated event and becomes a powerful lever for ongoing improvement and strengthening.
Red teaming is an advanced and powerful technique for simulating real attacks, assessing an organization’s defenses, and discovering attack paths that other methods would miss. Red teaming within a CTEM framework, for example, by integrating it with the solution Kartos by
Enthec,
multiplies its value: it is not a one-off exercise, but part of a continuous mechanism for evaluating and improving the security posture.
If your company is already using monitoring or scanning tools, adding red teaming (in a well-balanced way) can significantly increase the level of security. Ideally, these results shouldn’t be isolated but rather integrated into a CTEM strategy to ensure improvements are maintained over time.