Adversary Simulation is a critical service for businesses seeking to test their defences under realistic attack conditions. By simulating sophisticated, real-world attacks, organisations can better understand their vulnerabilities and strengthen their response capabilities. Our Adversary Simulation solution helps you identify weaknesses in your security architecture, verify the effectiveness of your defence mechanisms, and prepare for potential cyber threats. From Red Team exercises to Social Engineering attacks, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of your security posture and offer actionable insights to improve your resilience.
Why Our Adversary Simulation Stands Out
- Realistic Threat Simulation: We simulate real-world attacks to test how well your organisation would fare against sophisticated adversaries.
- Comprehensive Security Assessment: Our Red Team assessments cover multiple attack vectors, including physical, digital, and social engineering threats.
- Cloud-Specific Security Testing: We conduct Cloud Red Teaming to ensure that your cloud infrastructure and hosted applications are secure against modern attack methods.
- Verification of Defence & Response: We not only simulate attacks but also assess how your teams respond, ensuring that your defences are capable of detecting and mitigating threats effectively.
- Employee Awareness Testing: Through social engineering and phishing simulations, we identify gaps in employee awareness and help reduce human error as a point of attack.
Adversary Simulation Process
Our Adversary Simulation service follows a rigorous and systematic process, leveraging advanced attack techniques to simulate real-world adversaries. By closely mimicking how a sophisticated attacker would operate, we provide you with the intelligence needed to reinforce your security measures.
-
Step 1: Planning the Adversary Simulation Exercise
The first step involves defining the goal and scope of the simulation, ensuring alignment with organisational security priorities. This phase includes determining the exercise parameters, setting clear risk management guidelines, and identifying any concessions (such as certain systems or data excluded from testing). Establishing a communication protocol for reporting issues during the engagement is crucial to ensure clarity throughout the process. -
Step 2: Offence Preparation
In this phase, the focus is on identifying the critical functions and assets within your organisation that could be targeted during the simulation. This includes conducting a threat modelling exercise to identify potential attack vectors and vulnerabilities. Based on these findings, we will create realistic offensive scenarios tailored to simulate plausible Adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that align with your organisation’s threat landscape. - Step 3: Offence Execution
The execution phase involves simulating a real-world attack using the defined engagement model. This includes:- External Reconnaissance: Gathering publicly available information to identify weak points in the external environment.
- Perimeter Breach: Attempting to bypass external defences, whether via network vulnerabilities, application flaws, or social engineering tactics.
- Lateral Movement: Once inside, moving within the network to escalate privileges, access sensitive data, and identify other targets.
- Internal Information Gathering: Collecting intelligence about the internal infrastructure and business-critical systems.
- Privilege Escalation: Attempting to gain elevated access within the system, either via exploiting vulnerabilities or misconfigurations.
- Persistent Access: Establishing long-term access to critical systems to simulate a sustained attack.
- Action on Objective: Taking control of key assets or data as the final goal of the exercise.
- Use of Concessions: Any agreed-upon concessions (such as limited access to certain systems) will be used to guide the offensive efforts without violating boundaries.
This phase is designed to test all aspects of your organisation’s defences, including detection, response, and recovery capabilities.
- Step 4: Exercise Closure
Once the simulation has been concluded, the closure phase begins with clean-up activities to ensure that no persistent access remains within your systems. Any discovered vulnerabilities are contained, and the attack paths are sealed off to prevent real-world exploitation. This phase also includes preparing a defence report, which documents the defensive response to the attack and assesses the effectiveness of your incident response plans.- Attack/Defence Joint Replay: A collaborative session where both the offensive and defensive teams discuss the attack process, response, and areas of improvement.
- Final Report & Recommendations: A comprehensive report is delivered, summarising the findings, outlining the vulnerabilities and weaknesses discovered, and providing actionable recommendations for remediation.
- Strategic Remediation Action Plans: Specific, prioritised remediation plans are developed based on the findings, addressing critical issues first and outlining how the security posture can be improved over time.
- Sharing with Wider Audience: The results, findings, and action plans are shared with key stakeholders across the organisation, ensuring transparency and facilitating broad-based improvements to security.
Our Adversary Simulation Services
We offer a range of adversary simulation services designed to test your organisation’s ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate advanced cyber-attacks.
Red Team
- Simulate real-world, sophisticated attacks to test your organisation’s defences.
- Perform covert testing to mimic the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of advanced persistent threats (APTs).
- Evaluate your security operations centre (SOC) and incident response team’s effectiveness.
- Identify gaps in detection, response times, and communication during an attack scenario.
- Provide comprehensive reports with actionable findings and recommendations for improving your defence capabilities.
Defense and Response Capability Verification
- Assess your organisation’s ability to detect and respond to real-time cyber threats.
- Simulate a range of attack scenarios, including data breaches, insider threats, and external intrusion attempts.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your monitoring, alerting, and escalation procedures.
- Test the response times and decision-making processes of your security operations team.
- Provide recommendations to enhance response strategies, threat detection, and incident management.
Cloud Security Breach Simulation
- Simulate a cloud security breach to test your organisation’s response to cloud-based incidents.
- Assess your cloud service provider configurations and identify any weaknesses or misconfigurations.
- Evaluate the security of your cloud applications, databases, and network infrastructure.
- Simulate attacks targeting cloud-specific vulnerabilities such as insecure API access and misconfigured identity management.
- Provide detailed reports with remediation steps to improve cloud security posture and incident response.