Executive narrative
A board-readable kill-chain story: which adversary, which crown jewel, how far they got, and what stopped them — or didn’t.
Consulting · Adaptive Red Team Ops
We don't run pentests. We become the adversary already targeting your sector.
A multi-week engagement that picks the named threat group most likely to target your industry, mirrors their tradecraft against your real environment, and tells you, technique by technique, what your defenders did and didn't see on the way in.
Pentests don't simulate the attacker who's coming for you
A generic pentest tells you generic things. The adversary is specific.
The threat actor most likely to attack a regulated financial entity doesn't behave like the one going after an aerospace supplier or a state utility. Their tradecraft, their dwell time, their crown-jewel objectives are different. A red-team engagement that doesn't pick which adversary it's emulating is just a high-priced vulnerability scan with a report cover.
Generic pentest
- · OWASP / network checklist
- · Scoped to "the application" or "the network"
- · Time-boxed to weeks regardless of adversary realism
- · Output: list of CVEs and misconfigurations
- · Re-run next year against the same checklist
Adaptive Red Team Ops
- · Intel-led: named adversary profile drives TTP selection
- · Scoped to crown jewels, not arbitrary asset lists
- · Multi-phase, paced to the adversary's real dwell time
- · Output: kill-chain narrative + detection-gap inventory
- · Each engagement informs the adversary profile for the next
Methodology
Seven phases. One adversary. One crown jewel at a time.
Intel scoping picks the adversary profile. The engagement runs through their canonical kill chain — at their pace, with their tradecraft — while we instrument both attacker and defender activity for the debrief.
Deliverables
What lands on your CISO's desk. What lands on your SOC's screen.
Technical kill-chain log
Every TTP, every artefact, every command — indexed to MITRE ATT&CK sub-techniques. Pasteable into your case management.
Detection-gap inventory
Ranked list of every technique that your SIEM, EDR, NDR, or human SOC failed to escalate. Each gap paired with a recommended detection.
Remediation roadmap
Prioritised, time-bound, and scoped to your budget. We don’t hand over a wish list — we hand over a quarter-by-quarter plan.
Re-test scope
A precise, narrow re-engagement contract that validates only the gaps you closed. Cheap, fast, evidence-based regression.
Adversary profile artefact
A reusable threat-actor profile (your sector, your geography, your stack) that informs the next engagement and feeds your TI workbench.
Sample engagement · BFSI · six weeks
A regulated payments operator. One adversary profile. Six weeks.
A worked example of how an Adaptive Red Team engagement runs. Sector is anonymised; tradecraft, timings, and outcomes are representative of recent regulated-finance engagements.
Week 0
Intel scoping + rules of engagement
The team starts with a joint CISO workshop to model the threat profile of a regulated payments operator. After identifying the critical targets (the cardholder data, settlement engine, and payment-switch HSM), they lock down the strict rules of engagement and safe-stop signals required to keep the simulation controlled.
Week 1
Recon
Passive OSINT only — same window the real adversary would take. Map the public attack surface. Identify weak supply-chain entry points (vendors, contractors, internet-exposed services).
Week 2
Initial access
A spear-phish targeting three named recipients in finance ops. One bites. Foothold lands on a junior endpoint. The SOC sees nothing — there is no rule for the loader family the adversary profile uses.
Week 3
Foothold + lateral movement
Persistence via a benign-looking scheduled task. Lateral movement uses signed system binaries and existing remote-admin tools. The host EDR fires twice and is acknowledged-and-suppressed by the on-call analyst.
Week 4
Privilege escalation + identity compromise
Misconfigured Group Policy lets a domain user write to a server in scope. Kerberoasting yields a service-account hash. The hash cracks offline. Domain admin in 11 days from initial click.
Week 5
Crown-jewel access · proof of impact
Read-only proof of access to the cardholder data store and the settlement-engine console. No data exfiltrated, per ROE — a token file with the engagement ID is dropped in each location for evidence.
Week 6 · Debrief
Three sessions. CISO + risk + audit. SOC leadership + engineering. IT + identity + endpoint. Same kill chain, three lenses, three remediation tracks. Six weeks later: a narrow re-test confirms the loader family now generates an alert, the suppressed-EDR pattern is fixed in the SOC playbook, and the service account is rotated and constrained.
What changes after engagement
You stop arguing about whether you'd be breached. You start measuring how.
A named adversary profile
Concrete, sector-relevant, reusable. The TI workbench inherits it.
Ranked detection gaps
With proposed SIEM/EDR detections. Hand it to engineering, get it shipped.
Validated incident playbooks
Run against a real chain. The ones that break in the engagement are fixed by the retest.
A regulator-grade narrative
Audit-and-regulator-ready evidence of proactive testing — not a checkbox in a procurement form.
Indexed to
- RBI cyber resilience guidelines
- SEBI CSCRF · IRDAI guidance
- CERT-In Directions
- MITRE ATT&CK
- TIBER-EU · CBEST · iCAST
- PTES
- OWASP MASTG · WSTG
Practice
"A red team that doesn't name the adversary it's emulating is just a high-priced pentest with a different report cover. The point isn't to break in. The point is to break in the way the people who will actually try."
Pick one crown jewel. Become the adversary coming for it.
Six- to eight-week engagements. Fixed scope. Fixed price. Three debrief sessions for three audiences. One re-test included.