Quick Guides
Choosing Between Penetration Testing, Attack Simulations, and Red Teaming
Understand how these approaches differ in purpose, depth, and outcomes, and how to choose the one that best supports the decisions you need to make.
Determining Security Testing Frequency
Learn how to align testing frequency with business change, risk exposure, and organizational capacity instead of relying on arbitrary annual schedules.
How to Decide What Should Be in Scope
Explore how to define scope in a way that produces meaningful insight, avoids false confidence, and reflects how your systems are actually used.
What to Do Before Your First Penetration Test
Identify the preparation steps that materially affect test quality, including access, documentation, expectations, and internal alignment.
What to Do After a Penetration Test
Learn how to interpret results, prioritize remediation, and use findings to drive improvement rather than treating the report as an endpoint.
How to Tell If Your Organization Is Ready for Advanced Testing
Assess whether prerequisites like ownership, visibility, and response capability are in place before investing in more sophisticated testing.
Signs That Your Security Program Is Not Ready for Meaningful Results
Recognize common structural and organizational gaps that limit the value of security assessments even when the technical work is sound.
What Security Testing Cannot Compensate For
Understand the limits of testing and why it cannot substitute for ownership, governance, or foundational security program maturity.
Using Penetration Test Results to Drive Improvement
Learn how to translate technical findings into concrete actions that improve security posture over time, not just point-in-time fixes.
Why Comparing Penetration Test Results Year Over Year Is Often Misleading
See why changes in scope, assumptions, and environment make simple comparisons unreliable, and how to interpret trends more responsibly.
What a “Clean” Penetration Test Report Does Not Mean
Clarify what a clean report actually indicates, what it does not cover, and how to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions from limited assurance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Direct answers to common questions organizations ask when evaluating security work.
We provide advisory, assessment, and testing services focused on helping organizations make better security decisions. This includes penetration testing, attack simulations, red teaming, and leadership-level advisory work. We focus on understanding risk in context, not on deploying tools.
We start by understanding what decisions the organization is trying to make and what uncertainty they are trying to reduce. The service follows from that, not the other way around. In many cases, the right answer is a smaller or different engagement than what was initially requested.
Most engagements begin with a scoping and alignment phase, followed by focused execution and a structured debrief. The emphasis is on clarity of objectives, realistic assumptions, and usable outcomes. We avoid open-ended or ambiguous work.
That depends on the type of work, but meaningful engagement requires some level of participation. We work directly with the people who own systems, processes, or decisions relevant to the scope. Security work done in isolation rarely produces lasting value.
You are likely ready if you can clearly articulate what you want to learn or validate. If basic ownership, visibility, or decision-making is still unclear, some forms of testing may produce limited value. Readiness is about clarity, not maturity labels.
There needs to be agreement on scope, assumptions, and how results will be used. The organization must be willing to act on what is learned, even if the findings are uncomfortable. Without that, even high-quality work will stall.
Penetration testing evaluates the security of specific systems or scopes. Attack simulations and red teaming evaluate how the organization responds to realistic attack paths across people, process, and technology. The difference is less about aggressiveness and more about what is being tested.
Red teaming makes sense when the goal is to understand organizational exposure and response, not just technical weaknesses. It is most effective when basic controls and ownership are already in place, and when leadership is prepared to engage with the results.
A report shows what was demonstrated under specific assumptions and constraints. It explains how access was obtained, what that access enabled, and what risks were observed within scope. It does not describe everything that could exist outside those bounds.
No. A clean report means that no significant issues were demonstrated within the scope and assumptions of the test. It provides bounded assurance, not a guarantee, and should be interpreted alongside what was not tested.
Want to sanity-check your approach?
If you have a specific decision to make and want a clear recommendation on what type of work fits, we can help.