Attack Simulation
Red Teaming

An Attack Simulation exposes an organisation's cyber defences to current adversarial tactics, techniques, and procedures to ensure they remain effective against real-world threats.

Attack Simulation Experts

Many variations of Attack Simulation exist in the cyber security marketplace today.

Our Attack Simulation methodology is designed to be authentic, realistic, and highly pragmatic. We combine technical excellence with a consultative approach to ensure that the engagement is aligned with your requirements, often deviating from an industry standard approach and creating novel delivery models to solve specific client detection and response challenges.

Our flexible delivery model is not constrained to a specific approach and can be tailored to deliver the information and outcomes you need.

What is an attack simulation?
What outcomes does an attack simulation provide?
Types of attack simulation
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FAQs

What is an Attack Simulation?

Cyber Attack Simulation (often referred to as ‘Red Team’) exercises are designed to evaluate an organisation’s susceptibility to cyber-attack. An attack simulation exercise spans the entirety of an end-to-end attack from the perspective of an external cyber attacker.

It holistically assesses all areas of the organisation, across people, process and technology, to determine how these factors can be abused and exploited by a malicious actor to achieve a set of relevant attack objectives.

Attack simulations replicate the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) used by advanced threat actors, performing a covert simulation exercise designed to assess the target organisation’s susceptibility to an authentic and realistic targeted attack.

What outcomes does an attack simulation provide?

Validate capability
effectiveness

Test and exercise your teams in a realistic live environment to accurately assess strengths and weaknesses.

Identify improvement opportunities

Highlight capability and control gaps across people, process and technology to build further cyber resilience.

Demonstrate business risk reduction

Communicate risk exposure, and the value of investment, by highlighting the business impact of an attack.

Further your security initiatives

Achieve your desired outcomes and gather evidence to evolve and improve your security operating model.

Types of attack simulation

The list below isn’t exhaustive and we regularly combine elements (and add new ones) to create custom solutions, solving unique challenges and delivering specific outcomes for our clients.

Red Teaming

A Red Team is typically a covert, clandestine exercise performed from the perspective of a realistic external attacker.

Leveraging adversarial tradecraft and tooling relative to the threat profile of the organisation being targeted. We use a flexible delivery model, ranging from full, black-box simulation of an external attacker, to an assumed compromise scenario where the attack is launched from a pre-existing foothold on the network, to meet a range of client requirements and budgets.

Purple Teaming

A Purple Team is a collaborative approach to measuring detection efficacy and highlighting capability and control gaps.

Whilst a Red Team exercise is designed to prove that compromise is possible by achieving a specific, high-impact ‘goal’, a Purple Team is designed to more broadly evaluate and improve the efficacy of detection controls along various attack paths. It is optimised to focus on improvement over realism, substituting the black-box nature of a Red Team for a more engaging testing and learning environment.

Ransomware Simulation

Ransomware attacks are one of the most prevalent cyber threats facing organisations today.

As a skilled and motivated attacker will inevitably breach even the most hardened external defences, it is important that organisations maintain layered defensive controls. We assess your overall susceptibility to ransomware attack, and the effectiveness of prevention and detection controls in either blocking malicious activity or prompting containment of the threat; from perimeter breach, to encryption, to recovery from backups.

Malware Simulation

Endpoint-level anti-exploitation controls are among the first lines of defence against internet-based threats.

Effective malware defences must both prevent and detect the running of malicious executables enabling an attacker to achieve code execution on a device. We target a standard end-user device and account with normal levels of privilege, delivering and running a range of malware executables in a controlled environment to assess the efficacy of technical malware defences.

EDR / MDR Assessment

Organisations looking to evaluate the efficacy of a third-party product or managed service typically simulate a large volume of offensive actions against a small number of devices.

However, this type of approach fails to replicate the flow or context of a real-world scenario. We use a goal-focused approach which assesses solution efficacy in a realistic, representative environment and considers various aspects of the service, including managed elements, providing the evidence to enable confident investment decisions to be made.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the characteristics of a typical Red Team exercise?

A typical ‘Red Team’ attack simulation exercise is: (keep the same from the red team page with the icons)

Objective-focused. Designed to prove or disprove whether an attacker can perform specific actions associated with risk events the business aims to guard against
Threat-led. Designed to use the techniques, tactics and procedures used by advanced threat actors which are likely to target the client organisation
Adversarial and covert. Typically a black-box, covert assessment conducted from the perspective of an external attacker without privileged information about the target
Authentic and realistic. Designed to expose the organisation to the pressures of a real-world cyber-attack to offer an opportunity to practice and assess how they would fare in a genuine attack scenario.

What are the goals of a Red Team exercise?

JUMPSEC aims to access systems and data that real-world attackers are likely to target, with realistic attacker goals relative to the organisation’s threat profile.

JUMPSEC can simulate end-to-end attacks with a range of goals including:

Access and exfiltrate sensitive customer data, with a view to exploit the information for financial gain (e.g. through theft of credit card information) extort the organisation under threat of GDPR sanctions, or undermine the integrity of the organisation to its customers.
Perform a malicious action for criminal gain, such as fraudulently making a payment.
Steal sensitive intellectual property or proprietary information that may threaten the organisation’s market competitiveness.
Tamper with business-critical systems to impair the organisation’s ability to operate through disruption or destruction.

Why should you undertake an attack simulation?

Undertaking an attack simulation exercise enables an organisation to understand its cyber risk exposure by attempting to simulate chains of attacker actions which, if executed in a real-world setting, would have a critical impact upon the business. Exercises such as Red Teaming enable you to evaluate your susceptibility to cyber-attack. They provide the answer to the following questions:

If we were cyber-attacked, what could an attacker achieve, and what might the business impact be?
Are our current security controls effective in preventing and detecting malicious activity on our network?
Is our cyber risk assessment accurate and are the controls we have put in place effective in mitigating risk to the business?

When is Red Teaming specifically right for you?

Organisations with a solid security baseline who have implemented robust security controls and are confident in the efficacy of their detection capability (in terms of both tooling and personnel capability) are able to maximise the opportunity provided by Red Teaming, using it as an opportunity to stress-test and exercise their security team.

However, Red Teaming typically takes the path of least resistance; the shortest route from the point of breach to the end-goal. Red Team exercises are designed to answer the question of “can the attacker cause harm”, as opposed to “how can I stop an attacker from causing harm”. This means that without Red Teaming an organisation’s broader defensive controls and capabilities are unlikely to be tested, resulting in limited learning and improvement opportunities.

For this reason, Red Team exercises are especially well-suited to organisations who have already invested in developing their cyber security controls and capabilities. Organisations who lack an established security baseline should consider alternative approaches which are less focused on realism, and more attuned to identifying and driving capability improvements, before engaging in a hyper-realistic simulation such as a Red Team.

What does a Red Team provide you with?

A JUMPSEC attack simulation will allow you to:

Stress-test your cyber resilience and effectiveness against advanced offensive capabilities used by real-world attackers
Validate the returns on your security investment to-date by assessing the effectiveness of your cyber controls and capabilities to combat an authentic and realistic cyber-attack.
Realise your risk exposure by assessing and understanding the likelihood of a successful attack.
Demonstrate the value of security investment by communicating cyber risk in clear business terms. A JUMPSEC Red Team will highlight the actual business impact of a cyber attacker achieving technical goals.
Enhance the cyber-readiness of your organisation by exercising your people, tuning your tooling, and optimising your processes in preparation for a genuine attack.
Identify areas for future capability development to inform your development roadmap and guide future cyber security investment.

What they've said about us

“Whether we’re developing our security strategies, assuring our development lifecycle processes or continually improving our SOC activities, having industry leader JUMPSEC by our side as our security partner gives us the confidence to move forward in an increasingly challenging environment.”

“JUMPSEC consistently provides high quality and reliable support, demonstrating expert knowledge in their field and composure in challenging situations, which gives us full confidence that they are the right security partner for the job!”

“They don’t just give you something out of a box; they’re quite willing to work with you to provide you with a solution that meets your needs.”

Achieve the cyber security outcomes you need.

We work to enable effective cyber security for our clients; helping them to future proof their cyber defences and realise genuine improvement over time.

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Attack Simulation Red Teaming