Red Team Testing | The Missing Link UK

A strategic approach to detecting vulnerabilities and training your blue team

The Missing Link’s cyber security red team will work with you to identify physical, process, and infrastructure security weaknesses within your organisation, then provide remediation guidance

In the world of IT, the red teamers’ role is to challenge your organisation’s security infrastructure, and the IT teams’ response, by simulating real-world attack scenarios to reach your critical accounts, credentials, secrets, or any other goal set.

Red team attack simulations are implemented to test your controls' robustness, justify security spending, and help your team refine your response procedures and loss mitigation processes. The defenders in red teaming activities are the blue team, who may be employed within your company or engaged as security consultants.

During a red team exercise, your blue team will be charged with blocking our red teaming activities. In the process of this risk-free adversary simulation, all security gaps are identified, enabling your organisation to develop more robust security controls.

At The Missing Link, our highly trained red team members will work closely with your organisation to design red teaming activities that meet your overall security objectives, budget and time frame. Depending on your needs, we can commence red team activities with limited knowledge of your security infrastructure or, if time and budget are more limited, with an assumed breach scenario. The initial access vector is white-carded.

At the conclusion of the red team exercise, you will be presented with a thorough review of the red teaming activities, detailing every attack simulation, your blue team’s response, and an assessment of the strength of your existing security defence.

Our security experts will detail any vulnerabilities, document opportunities to improve your organisation’s defences and deliver a step-by-step guide to support remediation.

Your partner in Red Team Testing

Our world-leading security experts will customise and implement a red team exercise to support your IT resource in its effort to meet your organisation’s security goals.

Protect your organisation from the threat of an attack

The Missing Link’s security experts will mount a risk-free real-world attack to test your security posture.

Benefit from the expertise of The Missing Link’s red teamers who have an unsurpassed knowledge of emerging international approaches to cyber attacks and hacking.

Red teaming activities provide detailed evidence of vulnerabilities and required remediation for reporting to Boards, security strategising and budgeting.

Our highly-trained security consultants will provide detailed advice on how to bolster infrastructure and physical security controls to protect sensitive information.

FAQs

What is a red team?

A Red Team is a team of highly trained security consultants that uses its skills to challenge an organisation’s security posture deliberately. These ethical hackers aim to identify gaps in your organisation’s defences and demonstrate how it would fare against real-world adversaries. When implementing red team activities, the Missing Link’s highly trained security professionals will conduct targeted attacks to test every level of your organisation’s security. By challenging its physical security controls and through cyberattacks, our red teamers will develop a vulnerability assessment of your organisation’s defences. Our security experts will then provide advice on countermeasures to enhance your security infrastructure.
What is a red team exercise?

A red team exercise comprises strategically planned attack scenarios that put your organisation’s security defences to the test and provide you with solutions to meet your security infrastructure goals. During a red team exercise, The Missing Link’s red teamers will challenge your organisation’s security posture holistically by simulating real-world threats and negotiating all of the security controls within your environment. Our team exercises will challenge your people, processes, and critical infrastructure to achieve the agreed target.
What is the goal of a red vs blue team exercise?

A red team exercise pitches The Missing Link’s security experts (the red team) against your organisation’s network security providers (the blue team) to identify vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure protecting your people, processes and physical assets. During this team exercise, The Missing Link’s highly trained Red Team will work to gain access to all your assets without being detected. Our ethical hackers will attempt to access your building, people, workstations, mobile and wireless devices. And, just as it happens in real-world attack scenarios, our red team members will move on to target your most valued servers in an attempt to take over your network.
Why perform red team assessments?

The whole idea of red team testing is to support your blue team - your organisation’s internal or external network security providers - in its effort to protect your organisation’s sensitive information from actual world cyber-attacks. Once our red teamers have completed their testing, they will present a review of the red teaming activities, detailing every attack simulation, your blue team’s response, the strength of your existing security defence and any vulnerabilities found. Our security experts will also document opportunities to improve your organisation’s defences and deliver a step-by-step guide to support implementation.
What are some common red team tactics?

Red team exercises take a holistic approach to testing security infrastructure, considering an organisation’s physical security, people, and processes. While penetration testing focuses on finding vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in specific technologies, red teaming activities replicate a real-world attack in its entirety. This will involve using multiple attack techniques and continuously adapting procedures or tools to suit the environment they are operating in to break down an organisation’s blue team's active defences.
Why is it called "red team"?

The term ‘Red Team’ was borrowed from military and intelligence operations. Red Teams were the offensive team, charged with challenging the plan for offensive/defensive operations and identifying gaps that could lead to failure. In the world of IT, red teamers are charged with gaining access to an organisation's most sensitive information by breaching its physical security controls and simulating targeted cyber attacks. The Missing Link’s red teamers are highly trained in criminal tactics, techniques and procedures based on research and actual breaches.

Perfect Partner Experience

A Red Team engagement consists of many little battles, some won, some lost, and that’s when you start to appreciate what you do well, and what needs improvement. Importantly, the team at The Missing Link are incredibly skilled and 100% emotionally invested in the challenge. We know we will be tested, and we know that The Missing Link team will beat us several times along the way, and that’s great – we learn, and we don’t make the same mistake twice. The whole exercise is really a lot of fun.

A key benefit for us is it allows us to test the response of our other digital security vendors. It’s almost impossible to validate the ROI for most of these products without subjecting them to very thorough testing. The Red team exercises are brilliant, the IT team love the experience, and it raises their level of engagement. We’re really looking forward to the next exercise.

Hugo Evans | IT Security and Platforms Manager, Sparke Helmore Lawyers