What Does “Good” Look Like in Red Teaming?

Effective red teaming begins with a clear objective and a realistic threat scenario. Good red team engagements:

• Target business-critical assets or processes
• Emulate tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by real-world threat actors
• Reflect the motivations of relevant adversaries (e.g., ransomware gangs, insiders, nation-state groups)

An engagement without a clear strategic objective, such as a vague attempt to “break in” fails to deliver actionable insight. Success depends on aligning the operation to specific business risks and simulating credible adversaries.

High-quality red teaming balances realism with operational safety. This includes:

• Clearly defined in-scope and out-of-scope systems
• Agreements on acceptable levels of disruption and rules of engagement
• Communication protocols for high-impact discoveries or live incidents

Well-scoped engagements avoid unnecessary friction while allowing the red team to simulate adversaries as closely as possible.

A mature red team engagement spans the full attack chain:

• Initial access through phishing, credential compromise, or exposed services
• Privilege escalation via misconfigurations or excessive permissions
• Lateral movement across identity, network, endpoint, and application layers
• Objective completion (e.g., data exfiltration, persistence)

What distinguishes good red teaming is not the number of vulnerabilities found, such as in pen testing, but the ability to simulate real-world decision-making, adapt tactics dynamically, and follow attack paths to completion.

One of the primary goals in red teaming is to uncover what the organization can and cannot see during a real attack. Effective operations test:

• Whether endpoint, cloud, and network telemetry detect attacker activity
• How fast alerts are triaged and contained
• The performance of incident response playbooks and communication workflows

Good red teaming measures the maturity of both detection and response capabilities under live-fire conditions, revealing where defenders succeeded and attackers remained undetected.

A strong red team engagement produces a detailed report that includes:

• Full attack narrative with timeline, tools used, and actions taken
• Breakdown of which controls failed, succeeded, or delayed the attacker
• Visual attack paths and pivot points Tactical and strategic remediation guidance

Good reporting prioritizes clarity and relevance. All teams from executives to end users should be able to extract value from the report without needing translation.

Red teaming does not end with a report drop. Strong engagements include:

• Structured debrief sessions with technical teams and executive stakeholders
• Purple team sessions to walk through the attack path and improve detections
• Support for remediation tracking and retesting, where needed

This collaborative follow-through transforms red teaming from a point-in-time test into a catalyst for maturity.