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We replicate the behavior of a named threat actor against your environment — not to find every vulnerability, but to answer the question your compliance program never asks: would your security team catch a real adversary?
What It Is
Adversary simulation is not a penetration test. Penetration testing finds vulnerabilities within a defined scope — it answers whether a path into your environment exists. Adversary simulation asks a harder question: given that a motivated, resourced threat actor has made it inside, would your team know?
We build our engagements around the MITRE ATT&CK framework — a structured, empirically grounded taxonomy of real-world adversary behavior. Rather than testing for generic weaknesses, we select techniques that map directly to threat actors relevant to your sector and risk profile. Every action we take during an engagement corresponds to something a real group has done against real organizations.
Named threat actor emulation is where this discipline gets serious. When we profile a group — their tooling preferences, initial access tradecraft, lateral movement patterns, and target selection criteria — and then replicate that behavior in your environment, the results are operationally meaningful in a way that a generic assessment cannot be. Your defenders are no longer tested against an abstraction. They're tested against a proxy for the actual threat.
The most important finding in a red team engagement is not the path you took. It's the detection you didn't trigger. Most organizations discover that their security investments are well-tuned against yesterday's threat actor — and silent against the current one.
Purple team engagements extend this work by running techniques in collaboration with your defenders — building detection logic in real time and validating it against live tooling. The output is not just a finding report but a measurable improvement in detection coverage.
What's Included
We identify the threat actors most relevant to your organization based on sector, geography, technology stack, and publicly known adversary targeting patterns. This determines what the engagement tests — not a generic attack chain, but a profile-driven emulation plan.
We build a structured execution plan that maps every planned technique to an ATT&CK identifier and documents the threat actor precedent behind its selection. The plan is shared with your team before engagement begins — or kept covert for a fully blind exercise, depending on your objectives.
We execute the emulation plan against your environment using the tradecraft, tooling, and operational tempo consistent with the profiled threat actor. Engagements can be full-scope (from external initial access) or assumed breach (from an established internal foothold), depending on what you need to learn.
We produce a structured report that documents every technique executed, whether it was detected, how long detection took, what triggered the alert (or didn't), and what specific changes to detection logic or log source coverage would close each gap. Findings are written for both technical leads and executive audiences.
For organizations that want to close gaps rather than just document them, we offer a purple team follow-up phase in which we work directly with your detection engineering team to build and validate new detection coverage against the techniques the engagement exposed.
Techniques We Emulate
The following techniques represent a sample of the ATT&CK sub-techniques we routinely execute across engagements. Specific technique selection is always driven by the threat actor profile developed during scoping.
Who It's For
Adversary simulation is most valuable to organizations with a mature enough security program that there is something to test. If you have a SOC, an EDR deployment, a SIEM with active detection content, and staff who would respond to an alert — adversary simulation will tell you whether that investment is working. If you don't have those things yet, we'll tell you that too, and point you toward what to build first.
Organizations in sectors that attract sophisticated, persistent threat actors — financial services, healthcare, critical infrastructure, defense industrial base, legal and professional services — have the clearest reason to understand how a real adversary would move through their environment. Generic penetration testing tells these organizations very little about their actual exposure. Named threat actor emulation tells them a great deal.
Companies that have experienced a breach or a near-miss are a particularly strong fit for this work. Having been through an incident changes what leadership wants to know. The question shifts from "are we secure?" to "would we catch the next one?" That's the question adversary simulation is built to answer.
Get Started
Every engagement starts with a scoping conversation — understanding your environment, your threat profile, and what questions you need answered. There's no standardized assessment here. Tell us what you're trying to learn, and we'll tell you whether and how we can help.
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