In cybersecurity, red teams simulate the creative and often effective ways malicious actors gain entry to an organization’s most sensitive systems. Unlike traditional cybersecurity testing, red teaming exercises think outside the box, testing everything from employee security awareness to physical security.
Red team exercises use various strategies to mimic real-world attacks or challenges through convincing simulations. The goal is to uncover vulnerabilities and assess whether an organization’s security responses are adequate for today’s complex threats.
Red teaming empowers organizations to defend against threats proactively, provided the red team executes the right exercises.
In this guide, we’ll break down how red teaming works and provide examples of red teaming exercises that move the needle for organizational cybersecurity.
Red teaming exercises are considered the gold standard in cybersecurity testing. They employ experienced, creative testers who emulate real-world adversaries, putting an organization’s defenses to the ultimate test. Red teams try to gain as much unauthorized access as possible to expose weaknesses in an organization’s defenses.
Red teaming exercises differ by organization, but they often follow a structured process similar to the steps outlined below.
Red teaming exercises use various tactics to gain access to sensitive systems. Here are three examples of red teaming exercises that put organizations’ cyber infrastructure to the test.
Phishing emails are an age-old problem for organizations. While they aren’t new, these attacks are still highly effective—and phishing remains the most common type of cyber crime. Red team exercises frequently conduct phishing simulations to test employees’ knowledge of phishing, malicious links, and suspicious attachments.
Physical security is a crucial but often overlooked part of cybersecurity. For example, malicious actors sometimes leave USBs containing malicious code in office parking lots, hoping employees will plug them into their machines.
Other physical security issues, like lock-picking or tailgating, are common red team exercises for identifying security weaknesses.
With insider threats, a red team member acts like a disgruntled employee or compromised contractor. This red team exercise simulates data theft and unauthorized access that malicious insiders use to wreak havoc in an organization. It’s ideal for testing an organization’s existing monitoring and detection systems, which should stop insider threats in their tracks.
As generative AI becomes more integrated into business operations, securing these systems against adversarial threats is critical. Red teaming exercises help identify vulnerabilities in AI models, ensuring they remain resilient against manipulation, bias exploitation, and security breaches.
While red teaming can be used intermittently to assess the security of AI platforms, red teaming tools that offer continuous automated red teaming (CART) operate 24/7 to provide real-time insights into the platform’s security posture.
Here are a few examples of red teaming exercises that can be used to test the security of AI platforms.
These tests simulate attacks where malicious or biased data is injected into training databases to skew AI outputs. Red teamers assess the model’s resilience against backdoor attacks and data corruption strategies.
Red teams evaluate whether attackers can extract sensitive or proprietary information from an AI model by querying it in specific ways. Exercises include membership interference attacks and model inversion techniques to expose privacy risks.
Red teams can also simulate scenarios where AI-generated content is misused for spreading misinformation, deepfakes, or harmful narratives. Red teamers evaluate the effectiveness of content moderation, policy enforcement, and automated detection systems.
Red teams want to assess AI APIs for vulnerabilities such as unauthorized access, privilege escalation, and malicious API calls. Red teamers test for injection flaws, API rate-limit bypasses, and improper authentication mechanisms.
These exercises simulate adversarial bots attempting to bypass AI-driven fraud detection or authentication mechanisms. Exercises include CAPTCHA bypass tests, automated query flooding, and behavioral mimicry to evade AI security defenses.
These tests assess whether AI models can be manipulated into bypassing safety filters through cleverly engineered prompts. Red teams use jailbreaking techniques, context manipulation, and stealthy prompt attacks to evaluate guardrails.
Organizations that implement these red teaming exercises can proactively identify weaknesses in AI systems and models, enhance their security defenses, and build more resilient, ethical, and trustworthy AI platforms.
Whether you need to test your organization’s cybersecurity setup or assess your readiness for specific concerns, like physical security, red team exercises are a helpful tool to have in your corner. They proactively identify vulnerabilities, test defenses, and give organizations valuable insights into their weaknesses.
Malicious attackers want access to your data, and they’re getting smarter by the day—with AI platforms squarely in their sights. Mindgard specializes in helping organizations stay ahead of threats with comprehensive AI red teaming solutions.
Book a MindGard demo today to see how red teaming builds resilience in AI models.
Most organizations conduct red teaming exercises once or twice a year. However, because of the increased incidence of attacks, finance, healthcare, or cybersecurity industries need to perform tests more frequently.
Both solutions are helpful for assessing cybersecurity readiness. Pentesting focuses on exploiting vulnerabilities in a system, while red team exercises simulate a full-scale attack employing a range of exploits.
The goal of a red teaming exercise is to proactively identify—and fix—weaknesses. Red teaming exercises are effective if your organization’s overall security posture improves over time. That includes identifying and stopping more threats, reducing employee-related security risks, and responding to threats more quickly.
