Red teaming is an objective-driven security assessment that simulates a real adversary and attempts to achieve a defined business objective. It is different from a penetration test, which typically identifies and validates vulnerabilities within a defined scope. A red team measures whether an attacker can combine weaknesses, evade detection, move through an environment, and ultimately accomplish an objective.
A penetration tester asks: “Which are the exploitable vulnerabilities in the system?”
A red team asks: “How can I chain weaknesses together to achieve the attacker’s objective?”
The key difference is that the red team operates from the attacker's perspective, while the blue team operates from the defender's perspective. The purple team brings both sides together to turn offensive findings into measurable improvements in defensive capabilities.
For example, a red team may gain access to an employee workstation and attempt to move toward a privileged system. The blue team may be expected to identify the activity through endpoint, identity, network, or SIEM telemetry.
A purple team exercise can then examine exactly what happened:
Which technique was used?
Was it detected?
Which control generated the alert?
Did the security team understand the alert?
How quickly could the activity be contained?
These activities are complementary components of a mature offensive security program. Finding vulnerabilities is important, but organizations also need to understand whether their security controls can detect and respond when those vulnerabilities are actively exploited.
|
Team |
Primary Role |
Main Objective |
Typical Activities |
Measures |
|
Red Team |
Simulates the attacker |
Achieve a defined objective |
Reconnaissance, initial access, privilege escalation, lateral movement, evasion, attack chaining |
How far an attacker can get and whether the objective can be achieved |
|
Blue Team |
Defends the environment |
Detect, investigate, contain, and respond to attacks |
Monitoring, threat detection, incident response, investigation, containment |
Detection coverage, response time, investigation quality, and containment |
|
Purple Team |
Connects offensive and defensive teams |
Improve detection and response through collaboration |
Attack simulation, detection validation, real-time knowledge sharing, control tuning |
Whether defensive controls detect and respond to known attack techniques |
Red teaming and penetration testing are both offensive security disciplines, but they answer different questions.
|
Area |
Penetration Testing |
Red Teaming |
|
Primary goal |
Identify and validate vulnerabilities |
Determine whether an attacker can achieve a defined objective |
|
Approach |
Vulnerability-focused |
Objective-driven |
|
Scope |
Usually predefined applications, APIs, infrastructure, cloud environments, or other assets |
May span people, applications, identities, endpoints, cloud, network, and physical environments depending on the objective |
|
Attack paths |
Tests individual vulnerabilities and relevant attack chains |
Attempts to combine multiple weaknesses into a realistic attack path |
|
Detection |
Detection capabilities may be evaluated but are not always the primary focus |
Detection and response are central to understanding defensive effectiveness |
|
Stealth |
Stealth may not be required. (Stealth is conducting security testing in a way that minimizes the chance of being detected by the organization’s security controls.) |
Stealth and adversary simulation are often important |
|
Credentials |
May use provided credentials or defined access levels |
May begin with limited or realistic attacker access |
|
Outcome |
Vulnerability findings and remediation guidance |
Evidence showing how far an attacker could progress and whether the objective was achieved |
|
Typical question |
“What can an attacker exploit?” |
“Can an attacker achieve this objective before we detect and stop them?” |
|
Best suited for |
Finding weaknesses and improving security posture |
Testing the effectiveness of the overall security program |
A penetration test may discover an exposed administrative interface, demonstrate authentication weaknesses, and prove that privileged functionality can be accessed.
A red team may use that weakness as one step in a larger attack chain. The team could then attempt privilege escalation, move laterally, compromise another identity, access a cloud environment, and ultimately reach a predefined objective.
This distinction matters because attackers do not think in terms of individual vulnerabilities.
They think in terms of paths to an objective.
A vulnerability that appears medium-risk in isolation could become critical when combined with another weakness. Conversely, a technically serious vulnerability may have limited real-world impact if effective monitoring and containment prevent an attacker from progressing.
That is what red teaming is designed to reveal.
A successful red team engagement is structured to simulate realistic adversarial behavior while maintaining clear safety boundaries.
Every red team engagement begins with a clearly defined objective.
The objective should represent something meaningful to the organization.
Examples include:
The objective determines how the engagement is conducted.
Before testing begins, the red team and organization establish rules of engagement. These define the permitted scope, testing windows, systems that must not be touched, escalation procedures, communication channels, and conditions for stopping an operation.
This is particularly important for red teaming because realistic attack simulation can cross multiple security boundaries.
The engagement typically begins with reconnaissance. It is the information-gathering phase where the red team learns about the target environment before attempting exploitation.
The red team attempts to understand the organization's externally visible attack surface and identify potential paths toward the objective.
Depending on the agreed scope, this may include examining: public-facing applications, APIs, domains and subdomains, cloud services, technology stacks, identity infrastructure, publicly available information, employee exposure, and external services.
The objective is not simply to produce an inventory.
The red team uses reconnaissance to understand how an attacker could enter the environment and where that initial access might lead.
The next phase focuses on obtaining an initial foothold.
Depending on the rules of engagement, this could involve exploiting an application vulnerability, abusing exposed credentials, compromising an externally accessible service, or simulating another realistic initial-access scenario.
The emphasis is on demonstrating a credible path into the environment.
Once access is obtained, the red team does not necessarily stop at the first vulnerability.
Here, red teaming begins to differ significantly from conventional penetration testing.
With an initial foothold established, the red team evaluates what can be reached from that position.
The team may investigate opportunities for privilege escalation, credential access, identity compromise, internal service access, cloud resource access, network movement, and application-to-application trust relationships.
The goal is to determine whether one compromised asset can become a stepping stone toward something more valuable.
For example:
External application → employee identity → internal application → privileged account → sensitive system
Each individual step may appear manageable. The combined attack path could represent significant business risk.
This is one of the most valuable outcomes of red teaming. It demonstrates how seemingly disconnected weaknesses can become a practical route to compromise.
The engagement ultimately comes back to the objective defined at the beginning.
A red team may discover multiple vulnerabilities but still fail to reach the target.
That result is valuable.
It demonstrates that defensive controls, segmentation, access restrictions, monitoring, or other security mechanisms prevented further progression.
On the other hand, successfully reaching the objective demonstrates that the organization has an attack path that requires attention.
The red team documents the complete chain rather than simply reporting individual vulnerabilities.
The final stage is collaboration.
After the engagement, the red and blue teams review what happened.
The discussion should cover:
This creates an opportunity to improve detection and response capabilities.
The value of red teaming is not simply proving that an attacker can get in. It is in helping organizations understand what happens after the initial compromise and whether their security program can prevent an attacker from reaching something important.
Red team pricing varies significantly because the engagement is highly customized.
Cost depends on factors such as:
A narrowly scoped exercise can be considerably less expensive than a full enterprise red team engagement.
However, red teaming is not always the right first investment.
If an organization has never conducted a penetration test, has limited visibility into its vulnerabilities, or does not have a functioning detection and response baseline, a traditional penetration testing engagement should be done first.
Red teaming assumes that an organization already has a reasonable security foundation.
If basic vulnerabilities remain unaddressed, spending heavily on sophisticated adversary simulation may simply demonstrate problems that a conventional pentest could have identified more efficiently.
A sensible progression is often:
Penetration testing → remediation → detection improvement → red teaming → purple team validation → continuous improvement
Red teaming should therefore be viewed as a way to test the effectiveness of the broader security program, not as a replacement for foundational vulnerability assessment.
Several established frameworks and methodologies can help organizations structure red team engagements.
MITRE ATT&CK provides a widely used knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques. It helps red teams model realistic attacker behavior and enables defenders to map detection capabilities against known techniques.
TIBER-EU provides a framework for threat-led penetration testing, particularly within the financial sector. It emphasizes intelligence-led testing and realistic simulation of relevant threat actors.
CBEST is another threat-led testing framework developed for the financial services sector, focusing on identifying and testing against threats that are relevant to an organization's specific environment.
NIST provides broader cybersecurity guidance that organizations can use to structure security testing, risk management, incident response, and defensive improvement.
These provide useful structure, but the engagement should ultimately remain focused on the organization's specific risks, objectives, technology, and threat model.
Traditional red teaming asks a fundamental question: Can an attacker use weaknesses across an environment to achieve a defined objective?
With AI agents, that question becomes more complex because the system may not simply process data. Instead, it can reason, make decisions, use tools, access data, and take actions on its own.
An agentic red team therefore needs to test more than prompts and model behavior.
It must evaluate the entire chain of AI → identity → tools → data → actions.
|
Traditional Red Teaming |
Agentic AI Red Teaming |
|
Attackers exploit applications and infrastructure |
Attackers can manipulate AI-driven decision-making |
|
Human-controlled actions |
AI agents can take autonomous actions |
|
Focus on credentials and privileges |
Focus on agent identity, delegated authority and tool permissions |
|
Lateral movement across systems |
Tool-to-tool and agent-to-agent movement |
|
Data exfiltration |
AI-assisted data discovery and exfiltration |
|
Evasion of security controls |
Manipulation of AI reasoning and approval workflows |
The objective is not simply to jailbreak an agent or make it produce an unexpected response. A successful red-team finding should demonstrate what the attacker can actually reach and accomplish.
For example, an attacker-controlled prompt may appear harmless until it causes an agent to invoke a privileged tool, retrieve restricted data, modify a record, or trigger a business transaction. The red team therefore follows the attack beyond the model and measures its reachable authority and potential blast radius.
This makes agentic red teaming increasingly important as organizations move from AI that answers questions to AI that takes actions.
A penetration test can tell you where vulnerabilities exist. Red teaming shows what an attacker can accomplish when these vulnerabilities are combined into a realistic attack path.
Your red teaming partner should help your organization move beyond isolated vulnerability discovery. They are required to evaluate real-world attack paths, defensive visibility, and the ability to stop adversaries before they reach critical objectives.
This is where the right testing expertise makes a difference. Siemba combines expert-led penetration testing with modern security testing capabilities to help organizations validate real-world attack paths across their evolving technology stack.
Whether you're securing MCP servers, AI agents and chatbots, LLMs, or APIs, Siemba's expert penetration testing helps identify and validate security weaknesses that could otherwise become part of a larger attack path.
With Siemba's PTaaS, remediation doesn't end when a finding is marked "resolved." Every fix is independently re-tested and verified, giving you the confidence that vulnerabilities have actually been closed.
Ready to see how your security holds up against a real attacker? Book a demo with Siemba.
Neither is universally better. Penetration testing is designed to identify and validate vulnerabilities, while red teaming evaluates whether an adversary can achieve a specific objective. Organizations often benefit from both as part of a mature offensive security program.
The appropriate frequency depends on the organization's risk profile, regulatory requirements, technology changes, and threat environment. Red teaming is particularly valuable after major architectural or security changes and as part of an ongoing program of offensive security validation.
Red teaming is particularly valuable for organizations with high-value data, complex cloud environments, mature security operations, or significant exposure to targeted attacks. Financial institutions, technology companies, healthcare organizations, SaaS providers, and large enterprises can use red teaming to test their ability to withstand realistic attacks.
Yes. In a controlled red team exercise, the blue team may not be informed in advance. This is often called a blind or covert assessment and helps measure the organization's real-world detection and response capabilities. The rules of engagement still define strict safety boundaries.