Welcome back to our CISO’s guide to red teaming series. Last week, I introduced five major roles that red teaming plays in cybersecurity strategies. Today, I want to fast-forward to what happens with the results of a red team engagement.
A red team engagement is only as valuable as what an organization does with its results. For a CISO, the true deliverable of red teaming is not the successful “attack” itself but the actionable insights that emerge. These then strengthen security strategy and inform board-level security assessments and budget decisions. CISOs report on cybersecurity readiness using red team metrics to drive improvements in SOC and IT systems and secure budget and resources to support high-level decision-making and long-term resilience.
Let’s look at four areas where red teaming results can make an impact for the business.
One of the most immediate impacts of a red team report is improvements in budgeting and project prioritization. This report is concrete evidence of where an organization is exposed, often in a storytelling format (“We were able to steal the CEO’s credentials and access sensitive M&A data because control X failed”). This can be incredibly persuasive when making the case for investments. For example, if a red team demonstrates that an attacker moved laterally with ease due to a lack of network segmentation, a CISO can justify spend on network micro-segmentation or network access control (NAC) upgrades. If the exercise shows that the SOC missed the attack because of limited log retention or coverage, it could justify expanding logging infrastructure or investing in a managed detection service. Often, these are things security teams have wanted to do, but now, they have the hard data to back the request. An executive might not loosen the purse strings just on hypotheticals, but telling them “During the simulation, our team failed to catch the intruder for 10 days because we lacked visibility in Cloud Region X, this $Y million investment will fix that” is compelling.
Metrics derived from a red team engagement play a starring role here. Organizations can coordinate with their blue teams utilizing endpoint security software to establish metrics like MTTD, MTTR, and a heat map of security control performance against specific tactics. A CISO might present to the board: “Our current average detection time for a breach (in this test) was 3 days. Our goal is to get it under 24 hours by end of year. To do that, we need to invest in XYZ technology or training.” Another key metric can be the “eradication success rate”; can an organization be sure that it has truly eradicated an intruder? If a red team is able to regain access due to residual footholds, this highlights a need for better clean-up tools or processes. These metrics turn the nebulous concept of “security posture” into something measurable and improvable, which executives and boards appreciate.
Red team findings can also affect the strategic direction of security programs. For instance, if time and again red teams show that phishing is the entry point, a CISO might decide to shift budget allocations toward more user-focused controls like advanced phishing training and new email filtering solutions or perhaps move more apps to SSO with phishing-resistant MFA. If findings consistently involve endpoint issues, maybe greater investment in EDR tuning or moving to a managed EDR service might be considered. Thus, red teams act as feedback mechanisms for whether previous investments are yielding results or if new ones are required. It’s not uncommon for companies to conduct a red team engagement before a major security initiative and again after to validate that the needle has moved. For example, a Year 0 engagement might show many gaps. Year 2 could reveal far better detection and fewer paths, justifying the ROI of these improvements.
Boards of directors today are acutely aware of cyber risks. Many ask management, “How do we know we’re secure? Have we tested ourselves?” A red team exercise provides a narrative that the CISO can bring to the board to answer these questions credibly. A CISO might share a sanitized summary of the following scenario:
We conducted a simulated APT attack on our company. The red team, acting as attackers, attempted to breach our critical systems. Here’s what they were able to do and here’s where they were stopped.
This storytelling is powerful. It avoids jargon and instead uses a plot, giving the board a clear picture of risk in context, not just as a theoretical. Crucially, it also highlights improvements. For example, a CISO might report, “Last year, our red team got to the crown jewels undetected. This year, we detected them halfway through the kill chain, an improvement, and next year, we aim to detect at initial ingress.” Such framing shows progress and accountability.
Boards also love benchmarks and frameworks. A CISO can map red team findings to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK or NIST CSF to show coverage. For example, they might present a chart of the MITRE ATT&CK tactics where an organization has strong vs. weak detection coverage, as revealed by the red team. If a heat map shows green (good) on initial access and execution (maybe the red team caught phishing and malware execution) but red (needs work) on lateral movement and exfiltration (it missed data staging and exfil), this is a straightforward way to communicate priorities to a board. A more accurate picture can be gleaned from a purple team assessment where coverage is key and many red team TTPs are tested over the frameworks. This can provide better insight into real metrics, systemic issues, and control efficacy. The board doesn’t need to know the technical nuance. They simply need to be shown “We’re strong in these 5 areas, moderate in 3, and weak in 2, and plans are underway to address the weak spots.” A red team exercise, and the subsequent organizational analysis, in essence provides evidence-based assurance. It’s much more convincing than simply saying, “We think our security is good because we have X tools.” Instead, it is much more effective to say, “We challenged our defenses with a real-world simulation and learned A, B, and C. Now we are fixing those and will retest.” This approach resonates well with good corporate governance, akin to internal financial audits or business continuity drills that boards are familiar with.
Another board-level angle is using red team results to quantify potential impact reduction. If, for instance, a red team determined that had there been a real attack, the cost could have been a major data breach with millions in fines (this kind of data is sometimes hard to find, but Kaggle and industry reports like IBM can provide sufficient insight). In this case, the CISO can argue how the investments and changes post-red teaming are averting such costs. Essentially, it’s demonstrating cyber risk management in practice: find the problems, fix them, and reduce the likelihood or impact of a breach. Over time, repeated red team exercises can show a trend line. Maybe the first one was able to compromise 5 high-impact assets, the next only 2, and so on, which can be translated into a risk reduction story for leadership.
On a more operational level, red team findings are gold for the SOC and blue team. Every detection missed is an opportunity to create a new detection rule or refine an alert. Many SOCs will take the indicators of compromise (IoCs) from a red team activity (like specific file hashes, command line strings, and C2 domains) and retroactively check if their tools picked them up and benchmark new generative AI security capabilities for anomaly detection. If not, why? Perhaps the logs weren’t there or thresholds were too high. They then improve those. For instance, if the red team used a tool that injected into dllhost.exe and it wasn’t caught, the SOC might implement new behavior analytics around processes spawning unusual children or scanning memory. If the red team succeeded in moving laterally using WMI and that wasn’t alerted, the SOC can tune their EDR to flag WMI execution originating from non-admin machines. This process of detection engineering is often accelerated by red teaming.
Additionally, red teaming can be used to train the blue team in a “lessons learned” way. Some organizations even do replays or purple team sessions after the main covert red team engagement is done. In a purple team model, the red and blue sit together; red shows “here’s what we did, step by step” and blue verifies where they saw something or not. They might rerun parts of an attack and ensure detections fire. This collaboration fosters knowledge transfer so that the SOC is better prepared for real threats. Over time, these drills significantly sharpen defenders’ skills. They start recognizing patterns (“This looks like that thing our red team did with DNS tunneling; investigate immediately”). In effect, red teaming provides a continuous training loop for the defense team under realistic conditions.
At the highest level, regular red teaming cultivates what might be called strategic cyber resilience. Resilience isn’t just about preventing attacks but also about ensuring that an organization can continue to operate and quickly recover even if an attack succeeds. Red team exercises often include objectives around testing DR plans or seeing if alternate systems stay intact. The findings thus inform not just how to prevent breaches but how to limit damage and rebound from them. If a red team found that a certain attack could take down a critical system and it would take days to rebuild, the CISO and IT can prioritize making that system more fault-tolerant or having hot standbys. In other words, red teaming can (in)validate the assumptions in business continuity plans.
By incorporating red team scenarios into broader risk scenarios, leadership can develop a more robust risk management strategy. For example, if multiple red teams show that third-party vendors are a consistent risk (perhaps they always manage to phish a contractor or use vendor credentials), an organization might decide to reduce that risk by changing how vendors connect. Perhaps they may implement stricter network segmentation for vendors or require hardware tokens for them. This creates alignment between technical findings and enterprise risk decisions, possibly even affecting contractual requirements for vendors.
Another significant advantage is tracking improvement over time. A single red team exercise gives a snapshot; doing them regularly gives a trend. A CISO can set targets like “By next year’s red team engagement, we aim to detect the red team at least at the data exfiltration stage, not after it has simulated customer data theft as happened this year.” This achievement would indicate improved resilience. Some advanced organizations have moved to a model of continuous red teaming, like Bugcrowd’s Continuous RTaaS, one of our three red teaming models. The idea is to go beyond a once-a-year check to leverage the ongoing validation of controls in a DevOps-like continuous cycle. As a result, red team outcomes feed directly into the daily, weekly, and monthly tuning of defenses; regular red teaming ensures that defenses stay tuned. At the executive level, this becomes part of the organization’s resilience story. The assumption changes from “if we get attacked” to “when attack attempts happen, we have confidence in our resilience and response, and here’s the evidence of how we have tested and strengthened our internal processes.”
A bank might realize from red team result patterns that insider threats are a big gap (since red teams acting as insiders had free rein). Strategically, it might establish an insider threat program, deploy user behavior analytics, or enforce stricter least privilege and monitoring on employees. These are all major initiatives that can stem from red team lessons.
Red team results often feed into compliance and external communication as well. Many organizations include summaries of such testing in their annual reports or customer assurances to demonstrate diligence. It builds trust to be able to say, “We don’t just meet compliance. We actively test ourselves regularly and improve.” In sectors like finance and critical infrastructure, demonstrating this capability can even favorably influence regulators or insurance underwriters (cyber insurers are increasingly asking if organizations do red team exercises, as they indicate maturity).
Thanks for reading this blog. Next week, our third installment of the series will look at how red teaming goes beyond technical vulnerabilities to expose holes in our people and processes.