Attack simulations: see how your company holds up against a real attack

A penetration test answers whether a given system can be broken and aims for maximum vulnerability coverage within a defined scope. An attack simulation goes further and tests the whole attacker path to a specific business goal, and whether your team would even notice it.

In practice the two complement each other. A pentest shows where the holes are in a single application. A simulation shows whether those holes add up to a real breach and whether monitoring and the response team react before the attacker reaches the data. A mature organization needs both.

We run Red Team without the defenders knowing, in a blind mode, to mirror a real targeted attack as closely as possible and measure detection capability. Purple Team puts offense and defense at the same table: our operators and your team work openly, improving detection rules during the exercise itself.

TLPT, or threat-led penetration testing, is the most formalized variant, run to the TIBER-EU framework and required by DORA for key financial entities. The choice depends on your maturity and goal. If you are still building detection, start with Purple Team. If you want to test readiness under real conditions, choose Red Team.

We do not start from tools, we start from threat intelligence. We establish which groups actually attack your industry and which techniques they use, then replicate their tradecraft mapped onto the MITRE ATT&CK matrix. That way the test covers the threats that genuinely apply to you, not a generic textbook scenario.

The full chain covers entry, most often through phishing or perimeter exposure, persistence, lateral movement, privilege escalation and reaching the agreed goal, for example customer data or a domain controller. Every step is documented and reproducible, so after the test you know not only that it worked, but exactly how.

The output of a simulation is not a vulnerability list, it is a picture of your real resilience. We measure which actions were detected and which went unnoticed, and how much time passed from action to detection and response. These are hard numbers you can drive down and compare on the next test.

The report contains a step-by-step attack narrative, a map of the techniques used onto ATT&CK and concrete detection gaps with recommendations for your SOC. In the Purple Team variant we finish with a joint session where we improve detection rules straight away, so part of the value arrives before the report.

For financial entities TLPT is an explicit DORA requirement, built on the TIBER-EU framework. NIS2 in turn expects essential and important entities not only to describe an incident response procedure but to be able to execute it, and a simulation is the best proof of that capability.

We prepare our reports so they can be presented to a regulator, with documented scope, method and evidence. A simulation confirms that the detection and response mechanisms declared on paper actually work under conditions close to a real attack.