TLDR
Red team engagements reveal which organizations will successfully contain real breaches and which will face catastrophic incidents. The predictive indicators are clear: detection speed, response timelines, lateral movement visibility, backup integrity, and stakeholder coordination under pressure.
Organizations that can’t detect simulated attacks within 24-48 hours won’t catch sophisticated adversaries moving at operational speed. Those taking hours to make containment decisions during controlled exercises lose the window entirely when legal obligations and executive pressure compound technical stress.
Red team findings don’t just identify vulnerabilities. They forecast incident response performance with uncomfortable accuracy, showing exactly how defenders will perform when attackers operate for real.
Introduction
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 documented a Muddled Libra intrusion where attackers social-engineered a helpdesk employee and escalated from initial access to domain administrator privileges in approximately 40 minutes [1].
By the time most security teams would have completed their initial incident assessment meeting, these attackers had already compromised the entire Active Directory environment.
This specific timeline reveals more than just an attack vector. It exposes a fundamental gap between how fast modern attackers operate and how quickly most organizations can detect and respond.
When incident responders analyze what went wrong, they consistently find the same pattern: organizations that struggle to detect and contain simulated red team activity face identical failures during actual breaches.
The relationship between offensive security findings and incident response performance is more direct than most security teams acknowledge. Red team engagements don’t just identify vulnerabilities. They predict, with uncomfortable accuracy, exactly how an organization will perform when attackers use those same techniques for real.
What We Find vs. What Gets Flagged
During red team engagements, we routinely encounter organizations with enterprise-grade EDR platforms, mature SIEM deployments, and dedicated security operations centers. On paper, their detection capabilities look comprehensive.
In practice, we maintain persistent access for days or weeks without triggering meaningful alerts.
The gap is detection effectiveness, not tool coverage. Consider a common scenario: we escalate privileges using a modified version of well-documented techniques like token impersonation or exploiting misconfigured service permissions.
These actions generate logs. The SIEM ingests those logs. But the alert rules either don’t exist, aren’t tuned correctly, or produce so much noise that security teams ignore them.
Sophos research shows attackers now reach Active Directory systems in an average of 16 hours after initial access [2]. Yet many organizations still rely on detection logic that assumes attackers will use loud, obvious malware.
When we move laterally using legitimate administrative tools like PowerShell remoting, WMI, and PsExec, we’re often invisible to detection systems configured primarily to catch malicious executables.
The Compounding Effect
This creates detection debt that compounds during actual incidents. Alert fatigue means security analysts dismiss or delay investigating the subtle indicators that distinguish normal administrative activity from attacker behavior.
Configuration gaps that seem acceptable during quarterly reviews become critical failures when attackers exploit them in hours rather than days.
The predictive insight is straightforward: organizations that fail to detect our privilege escalation during controlled engagements won’t catch sophisticated attackers doing the same thing under operational pressure.
When dwell time dropped to a median of seven days in 2024 [3], defenders lost the luxury of slow detection. Teams that can’t identify compromise within 24-48 hours during red team exercises typically discover real breaches only after attackers have achieved their objectives.
The Clock Starts When You Know, Not When They Enter
Detection is only half the equation. During red team engagements, we track two critical timelines: how long until we’re detected, and how long until someone does something about it.
The second timeline reveals more about incident response readiness than any tabletop exercise.
When our activity triggers an alert, we observe what happens next. In mature organizations, security analysts investigate within minutes, escalate appropriately, and convene response teams within an hour.
In most organizations, alerts sit in queues for hours. Initial investigations take another few hours. By the time technical and business stakeholders assemble for their first coordination call, we’ve already moved to our next objective.
The Execution Gap
The gap between having an incident response plan and executing it becomes painfully visible under pressure. Plans document escalation paths and decision authorities, but they don’t create muscle memory.
When a red team alert fires, we watch organizations struggle with fundamental questions: Who has authority to isolate systems? Do we shut down now or wait for executive approval? Which legal team do we notify first?
With attackers achieving lateral movement in an average of 48 minutes after initial access [4], decision-making paralysis becomes catastrophic. Organizations that can’t make containment decisions within four hours of detecting our activity during controlled exercises consistently lose the containment window during real incidents.
The communication breakdown patterns repeat predictably. Technical teams want immediate isolation. Business stakeholders worry about operational disruption. Legal counsel needs time to assess obligations. Security teams wait for consensus that never comes quickly enough.
Under Real Pressure
This reality applies universally across organizations. First-time execution under pressure always reveals gaps that documentation can’t address.
Organizations that take eight hours to contain simulated compromise during red team exercises will take longer when legal exposure, public relations concerns, and executive pressure compound technical stress.
Response speed during controlled scenarios directly predicts breach containment success when attackers operate for real.
Seeing Movement Before It Becomes Spread
Most organizations invest heavily in perimeter security while treating internal networks as trusted zones. This assumption creates the exact blind spot that red team engagements consistently exploit.
Once we establish initial access, we spend time quietly mapping the environment. We identify critical systems, locate domain controllers, discover file shares containing sensitive data, and map trust relationships between systems.
This reconnaissance phase generates network traffic, authentication attempts, and query patterns that should raise flags. In most environments, nobody notices.
The East-West Blind Spot
The weakness centers on east-west traffic monitoring. Organizations deploy robust external monitoring at network boundaries but lack comparable visibility into lateral movement within their networks.
When we use Remote Desktop Protocol to hop between systems, access file shares using compromised credentials, or query Active Directory for privilege escalation paths, we’re operating in a detection blind spot.
Network segmentation exists on architecture diagrams but fails in practice. VLANs provide logical separation without enforcing strict access controls. Jump servers meant to control administrative access become pivot points once compromised.
Credential theft detection remains primitive, with many organizations unable to distinguish legitimate administrative sessions from stolen credentials being used across multiple systems.
Threat actors are extending dwell time by one to two weeks specifically to collect high-value data through lateral movement [5], knowing that internal visibility gaps provide cover for thorough reconnaissance.
Organizations that can’t track our lateral movement during red team engagements face uncontrolled spread during ransomware incidents. Attackers map environments exactly as we do, only with operational urgency rather than controlled restraint.
The Test Nobody Wants Until They Need It
Red team engagements frequently reveal that backup systems exist within the same attack surface as production environments. We access backup servers using compromised domain credentials, locate backup storage on accessible network shares, and identify backup management consoles protected by the same Active Directory infrastructure we’ve already compromised.
Organizations test backups by performing scheduled restores in lab environments under ideal conditions. They rarely test recovery while simultaneously defending against an active adversary who is specifically targeting those backup systems.
The authentication mechanisms for recovery often depend on the same infrastructure that attackers compromise first.
The Ransomware Reality
Modern ransomware operators understand this dynamic. Backup destruction has become standard procedure before encryption begins. A healthcare red team assessment revealed gaps in backup verification processes that would have failed during actual ransomware encryption [6], despite documentation showing regular backup completion.
If we can reach your backups during a red team engagement, ransomware operators will delete them during a real attack. The recovery capabilities that provide confidence during quarterly tests become unavailable precisely when needed most.
Organizations discover this gap after encryption, when recovery options have already been eliminated by attackers who followed the same path we documented months earlier.
Technical Success Requires Non-Technical Coordination
The way organizations communicate during red team debriefs predicts how they’ll communicate during actual crises. When we present findings, we observe which stakeholders are in the room, how quickly technical details translate into business context, and whether executives understand the implications without requiring multiple explanations.
Technical teams that struggle to articulate risk in business terms during controlled engagements face amplified challenges when explaining active breaches to boards and legal counsel.
We’ve watched organizations spend hours debating vendor notification obligations during tabletop exercises, the same discussions that paralyze decision-making when real incidents demand immediate action.
Multiple Competing Priorities
The coordination challenges multiply under pressure. Legal teams need to assess breach notification requirements. Communications teams prepare public statements. Technical teams need approval to take disruptive containment actions. Insurance carriers require specific documentation.
Each stakeholder operates on different timelines with competing priorities.
Organizations that demonstrate clear communication channels and decision authority during red team exercises contain incidents faster and with less collateral damage than those discovering their coordination gaps during actual breaches.
From Findings to Forecasting
Red team engagements provide the most accurate forecast of incident response performance available to security leaders. The findings that matter most aren’t always the highest-severity vulnerabilities on technical reports.
They’re the patterns that reveal how organizations perform under pressure: detection speed, decision-making latency, communication clarity, and coordination effectiveness.
These capabilities determine whether breaches get contained in hours or days, whether ransomware encrypts ten systems or a thousand, whether recovery takes days or months.
Organizations should use offensive assessments to pressure-test their defensive playbooks, not just to identify vulnerabilities but to validate that response capabilities match the speed and sophistication of actual threats.
Understanding how attackers operate provides the clearest view of how defenders will perform when it counts. The gap between red team findings and incident response readiness isn’t theoretical. It’s predictive.
References
[1] Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. (2025). “2025 Global Incident Response Report – Muddled Libra Threat Assessment.” https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/resources/research/unit-42-incident-response-report
[2] Infosecurity Magazine. (2025). “Attack Dwell Times Fall but Threat Actors Are Moving Faster.” https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/attack-dwell-times-faster/
[3] Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. (2025). “2025 Global Incident Response Report.” https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/resources/research/unit-42-incident-response-report
[4] CyberScoop. (2025). “Cybercriminals picked up the pace on attacks last year.” https://cyberscoop.com/cybercriminals-record-speed-attacks-2024/
[5] Sygnia. (2025). “2025 Cyber Threat Trends: How Attackers Are Evolving.” https://www.sygnia.co/press-release/evolving-cyber-threats-2025-threa-report/
[6] ISECURION. (2025). “Red Team Assessment Services in 2025.” https://isecurion.com/red-team-assessment-services-2025.html