Industry Specific Adversary Insights

Securing your business-critical assets and operations requires more than traditional protective measures; it requires seeing your organization the way an adversary does. This collection of offensive security use cases illustrates how organizations across critical sectors, like Government, Finance, and Healthcare, are doing exactly that.  The industries differ, but there is a shared need to test defenses, understand where real-world attackers could break in, how far they could go, and what safeguards must evolve to stay ahead. 

Red Teaming Use Cases Available

These examples of Red Team engagements and penetration tests reveal how offensive testing teams can uncover gaps in your detection and response as well as potential attack paths.

Use Case: Government

A government agency responsible for critical public services commissions a Red Team engagement to assess its cybersecurity resilience. The exercise simulates an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack, testing the agency’s ability to detect, respond to, and mitigate cyber threats targeting sensitive government data, public infrastructure, and national security.

Use Case: Finance

A large financial institution conducts an assumed breach exercise to test its cybersecurity resilience.

The Red Team is tasked with simulating an advanced persistent threat (APT) attack, while the Blue Team monitors, detects, and mitigates threats in real-time.

Use Case: Healthcare

A regional hospital network conducts a Red Team engagement to evaluate its cybersecurity defenses. The exercise aims to simulate a sophisticated cyberattack targeting patient data, medical devices, and critical infrastructure, testing the hospital’s ability to detect, respond to, and recover from an intrusion.

Red Team: Government Use Case
Red Team: Financial Use Case
Red Team: Healthcare Use Case

Pen Testing Use Cases Available

While Red Team engagements take a broad approach, emulating real adversaries to test an organization’s detection, response and resilience, penetration tests focus on identifying and validating specific vulnerabilities in defined systems. Both testing types serve important roles and are often used together as part of an offensive security strategy.

Use Case: Government

A national government agency operates a secure web platform for delivering citizen services such as benefits applications, licensing, and tax filings. The agency wants to proactively identify weaknesses in its public-facing and internal systems before they can be exploited by hostile actors

Use Case: Finance

A major retail bank relies on a cloud-hosted customer banking portal and an internally developed mobile app for millions of customers worldwide. The bank wants to ensure these systems are resistant to real-world cyberattacks that could compromise customer data, disrupt transactions, or damage trust.

Pen Test: Government Use Case
Pen Test: Financial Use Case

Use Case Operational Phases

In each use case you’ll find the same operational phases: initial access, lateral movement & privilege escalation, maintaining persistence and evasion, simulated attack scenarios and red team engagement & blue team training. The activities in each phase may vary based upon the engagement, so please view your industry to learn more.

Outcome & Lessons Learned 

  • Identified Weaknesses: The exercises exposes vulnerabilities in various areas including but not limited to third-party services, email filtering, endpoint security, privilege management, network segmentation and insider threat detection. 
  • Security Improvements: The agencies may implement many new security measures including but not limited to zero-trust architecture, network segmentation, multi-factor authentication (MFA), stricter browser security policies, improved lateral movement detection and continuous security monitoring. 
  • Enhanced Cyber Resilience: The agency adopts a proactive security strategy, conducting regular Red Team and Pen Testing engagements to safeguard national security assets. 

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