Red Team & adversary simulation
Cube Cyber's red team engagements emulate real attacker tradecraft against your organisation as a whole, people, processes and technology together, pursuing agreed objectives the way an actual adversary would. Where a penetration test asks which weaknesses exist, a red team asks the harder question: would you detect and stop a capable attacker before they reached what matters. Exercises are mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and designed to leave your defenders measurably better.
Discuss A Red Team Exercise
Red teaming answers questions other testing cannot:
Red teaming earns its cost when the basics are already in place, established detection capability, a response plan, and prior penetration testing, and the question has shifted from what is vulnerable to whether the defence works end to end. Common triggers are a maturing SOC that needs validation, board or regulator interest in demonstrable resilience, and sectors facing capable adversaries. If foundational testing has not happened yet, we will say so and recommend the cheaper engagement first, a red team against an untested environment proves little and costs more.
Core capabilities & deliverables
Goal-based red team operations
Objective-driven exercises, reach the payment system, access the clinical records, obtain domain control, executed with realistic tradecraft across initial access, persistence, lateral movement and objective actions, within tightly governed rules of engagement.
Adversary simulation
Emulation of specific threat actor behaviours relevant to your sector, mapped to MITRE ATT&CK techniques, so the exercise reflects the adversaries you actually face rather than a generic attacker.
Purple team exercises
Collaborative engagements where our operators work alongside your defenders in real time, executing techniques, observing detection, tuning and re-executing, the fastest way to convert an exercise into improved detection coverage.
Assumed breach scenarios
Exercises starting from a foothold, a compromised workstation or set of credentials, testing what matters most in modern incidents: how far an attacker gets once inside, and how quickly they are found.
Social engineering operations
Phishing, pretext and physical access elements integrated into scenarios where in scope, because real intrusions rarely begin with an exploit and usually begin with a person.
Detection and response
A complete attack narrative mapped to ATT&CK, what was attempted, what was detected, what was missed, and where response faltered, with prioritised improvements for detection engineering, process and architecture.
Engagements follow four stages under strict governance:
Define
Objectives, scenarios, scope and rules of engagement agreed with a small trusted group, including deconfliction contacts, and clear boundaries around production and safety.
Execute
The operation runs over weeks rather than days, with operator discipline, continuous logging of actions, and immediate escalation of any critical exposure discovered along the way.
Reveal and debrief
The full narrative walked through with defenders and leadership, timeline against detections, what worked, what did not, in a tone aimed at improvement, not blame.
Improve and re-test
Prioritised uplift for detection, response and architecture, with purple team follow-ups or targeted re-execution to verify the improvements hold.
Operations are mapped to MITRE ATT&CK and conducted under agreed rules of engagement with defined authorisation. Exercises can support regulatory and board assurance expectations, including for APRA-regulated and SOCI-covered organisations, and findings feed directly into our detection engineering where clients use our managed services, or yours where they do not.
APRA-RegulatedSOCIFrequently asked questions
Scope and question. A penetration test finds and demonstrates vulnerabilities in defined targets; a red team pursues objectives across the whole organisation using realistic tradecraft, and tests whether your detection and response stop it. Penetration testing measures weaknesses; red teaming measures defence.
A small trusted group, typically security leadership and a deconfliction contact, so the defence responds genuinely. Executives are informed appropriately, safety and production boundaries are absolute, and the reveal is structured so defenders experience it as training, not ambush.
A purple team runs attacker techniques with your defenders watching in real time, tuning detection as you go. It trades realism for learning speed, and it is often the better first engagement: measurable detection improvement in days. Full red teams then validate that the improvement holds against an adversary who is not announcing themselves.
The honest test: you have detection capability you believe in, a response plan with owners, and prior penetration testing with remediation done. If not, a red team will prove the obvious expensively, and we will recommend the right cheaper step instead, usually a purple team or targeted testing, with the red team staged for when it will teach you something.
Scenarios can include OT objectives, but execution respects hard boundaries: we do not run adversarial operations against live control systems. OT elements are handled through assumed-breach positioning, passive assessment and tabletop integration, informed by more than 10 years of OT experience, realism without operational risk.
Typically two to eight weeks end to end, planning, an execution window of two to four weeks, then reporting and debrief, with purple team follow-ups scheduled after remediation. Adversary simulation and assumed-breach exercises can be shorter and more targeted.
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