Adversary Simulation

What is adversary simulation

Adversary simulation involves the controlled execution of a simulated cyber attack actions to evaluate how an organisation’s people, processes, and technology respond to malicious activity.

These tests are guided by real-world threats, following threat actor tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and recognised frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK to simulate attacks.

What are the benefits

By emulating attacker behaviours, Adversary Simulation helps organisations understand how well they would withstand, detect and respond to a cyber attack. 

The output from an assessment is a view of how security controls and response processes perform under realistic conditions, allowing potential risks to be identified and gaps mitigated.

What Does It Involve

Adversary simulation encompasses a range of testing approaches, including red team testing, purple team exercises, social engineering, and AI red teaming. Tests and activities are designed to challenge assumptions and assess specific concerns an organisation holds. 

Engagements follow clear objectives, scope, and realistic threat scenarios aligned to the organisation’s risk profile, followed by the simulation of attacker behaviour using controlled and ethical techniques.

Adversary Simulation Services

Simulation of threat actor activity to assess how effectively an organisation can prevent, detect, and respond to targeted attacks.
Engagements follow realistic threats and adversary behaviour, providing insight into how an attacker could achieve their objectives and where security controls, monitoring, and response processes require improvement.
Collaborative assessments where the Red (offensive) and Blue (defensive) teams work together to improve detection and response capabilities in real time.
Exercises deliver knowledge sharing and control optimisation, enabling security teams to validate detections, tune alerts, and strengthen response procedures against realistic attack techniques.
Assessment focus on human attack vectors, such as phishing, to assess awareness, resilience, and response to social engineering threats. Assessment outputs support improved training and awareness activities.
Our services include remote and onsite activities to gain unauthorised access to information, such as credentials or sensitive files.
Assessment of AI Large Language Models (LLMs) and chatbot solutions to identify vulnerabilities that could lead to sensitive data exposure, training and retrieval poisoning, or compromise of the underlying AI runtime and connected systems
Our approach follows best practice, including the OWASP LLM Top Ten, ensuring coverage of common and emerging LLM-specific risks.

FAQ

Red teaming involves simulating a realistic adversary to test how far an attacker could progress within an environment without detection, based on agreed objectives and scope.
Scenario-based testing focuses on specific threat scenarios, such as ransomware or data exfiltration, to assess how systems and teams respond to particular risks.
Purple teaming is a collaborative approach where testing activity is coordinated with defensive teams to improve detection, response, and understanding in real time.
Penetration testing focuses on identifying specific vulnerabilities within defined systems, while red teaming simulates a realistic adversary to assess how far an attacker could progress across an environment and how effectively detection and response processes operate.
Adversary simulation is best suited to organisations with an established security baseline and a need to assess detection and response capabilities.
MITRE ATT&CK is a knowledge base developed by MITRE that documents real-world adversary behaviours, techniques, and tactics observed in cyber attacks. It is commonly used to understand how attackers operate across different stages of an attack.
MITRE ATT&CK is used to plan and structure adversary simulation activities by mapping simulated attacker behaviour to recognised tactics and techniques. This helps ensure scenarios reflect real-world threats and allows testing of detection and response across different stages of an attack.
TTPs stands for Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. They describe how attackers plan and carry out attacks: the overall goal (tactics), the methods used to achieve it (techniques), and the specific ways those techniques are executed (procedures). TTPs are commonly documented and categorised within frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK.
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