Increase Red Team Operations 10X with Adversarial Exposure Validation

Red teaming is a powerful way to uncover critical security gaps by simulating real-world adversary behaviors. However, in practice, traditional red team engagements are hard to scale.

Usually relying on highly skilled experts to run, they can take weeks to plan, execute, and then report findings. By the time you get your results back, they may already be outdated, or worse, exploited.

In the real world, attackers don’t wait for your team to finish its report. And in today’s AI-powered threat landscape, waiting weeks for red team results is no longer a viable option.

CISOs and security leaders need offensive testing that’s faster, more consistent, and more scalable, without draining budgets or resources.

The answer? Adopt the Adversarial Exposure Validation approach.

The Challenge of Scaling Red Team Activities

Before we get to the solution, let’s break down why scaling traditional red team operations has been so difficult:

• Human Expertise Bottleneck: Red teaming depends on rare and expensive talent who can think like attackers. And with limited staff and even more limited budgets, red teams have a lot of trouble scaling their operations. Without proper automation, repetitive tasks pile up, blocking your experts’ ability to focus on what matters most.

• Time and Resource-Intensive: Manual red team operations take weeks and usually produce a one-time snapshot of security posture. In fast-changing environments, that snapshot can become irrelevant almost immediately.

• Lack of Continuous Coverage: Most red team exercises are infrequent and customized. Long gaps between tests leave organizations blind to any and all new exposures that emerge between engagements.

Organizations need offensive testing that is automated, continuous, and scalable. The Adversarial Exposure Validation approach meets this demand head-on by combining Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and Automated Penetration Testing.

Breach and Attack Simulation: Continuous Security Control Validation

Breach and Attack Simulation continuously mimics known cyberattacks and adversary techniques mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, simulating actual attacks to your specific environment and defenses to test how well they detect, block, and respond at every stage of the kill chain.

Why BAS matters:

• Breadth of Coverage: Modern BAS solutions simulate thousands of known and emerging threats from ransomware to lateral movement and data exfiltration.

• Continuous and Safe Testing: BAS runs non-intrusive simulations safely in live production environments, enabling daily or weekly testing without disruption.

• Control Validation: BAS answers a crucial question, “Would our tools detect or block this attack?” and identifies gaps in your SIEM, EDR, or firewall stack.

• Drives Purple Teaming: BAS outputs can be used to facilitate collaborative exercises between red and blue teams to refine detection and response.

With repeatable and on-demand testing, BAS enables faster remediation, continuous benchmarking, and the agility to respond to new threats without waiting for the next audit or assessment.

Automated Penetration Testing: Think and Test Like an Attacker

Automated Penetration Testing emulates attacker workflows to discover real and exploitable attack paths without needing a full red team on standby. While BAS checks whether your controls react to threats, Automated Pentesting asks: “Can I get in? And if so, how far can I go?”

What sets Automated Pentesting apart:

• Attack Path Discovery: Automated Pentesting solutions chain together vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to simulate end-to-end attack paths from initial access to domain takeover.

• Real-World Exploitation: Automated Pentesting solutions run safe and controlled exploitation to prove actual risk.

• Impact-Driven Findings: Automated Pentesting reports show which systems or assets were compromised and help prioritize remediation based on real exposure.

• Frequent Deep Dives: Automated Pentesting assessments can run far more often than traditional red team exercises, helping teams catch and fix issues before a real attacker finds them.

By revealing exploitable paths and chaining risks that may otherwise seem low-priority, Automated Pentesting offers a realistic picture of what attackers could achieve in your environment.

How BAS and Automated Pentesting Complement Each Other

BAS and Automated Penetration Testing serve distinct but complementary roles in the Adversarial Exposure Validation approach.

BAS focuses on validating your defenses and testing whether your controls are continuously detecting and blocking known attack techniques. It’s ideal for drift detection, control tuning, and validating SOC visibility.

Automated Pentesting, on the other hand, focuses on proving what happens when those defenses fail. It uncovers real attack paths, exploits weaknesses, and shows potential impact especially valuable for prioritizing risk and reducing blind spots.

Used together, BAS and Automated Pentesting offer:

• Ongoing Visibility: BAS provides frequent, repeatable testing across environments to maintain continuous visibility.

• Depth and Impact: Automated Pentesting delivers rich, context-driven insights that help teams focus on the threats and fixes that actually matter.

• Balanced Coverage: BAS is typically used by blue and purple teams to improve detection, while Automated Pentesting supports red teams with scalable offensive capabilities.

Together, they transform offensive testing from a once-a-year project into a continuous and operationalized practice that evolves with the constant changes to both your security environment and the overall threat landscape.

Scaling Red Team Operations with Adversarial Exposure Validation

Here’s how Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) helps red teams do more with less:

• Force Multipliers: With AEV, you can run thousands of attack simulations automatically that are impossible to replicate manually at scale.

• Codified Expertise: Your red teams can build reusable BAS scenarios, creating a threat library tailored to your organization.

• Continuous Readiness: Rather than waiting for the next assessment, teams have a constant, nearly-real-time insight into how their security posture is evolving.

• Smarter Prioritization: Automated Pentesting filters out the excess alert noise, helping security teams focus on the exposures that are actually exploitable and high-risk to your organization.

Most importantly, automation frees human red teamers to do what they do best: uncover complex attack vectors, test advanced threat models, and simulate the unexpected while letting automation and their existing defenses handle the rest.

Want to Implement Adversarial Exposure Validation?

Adversarial Exposure Validation isn’t just about having the right tools in the right places. It’s at least as much about adopting a threat-driven mindset and embedding continuous validation into your security operations.

If you’re looking to unify your offensive testing efforts, Picus Security offers an integrated platform that combines Breach and Attack Simulation and Automated Penetration Testing to deliver actionable outcomes. Highlights include:

• 30,000+ Real-World TTPs: The Picus Threat Library covers a wide range of threats, from ransomware to cloud misconfigurations.

• Built-In Remediation: Get ready-to-use, vendor-specific remediation suggestions from the Picus Mitigation Library.

• Unified Validation: Validate both your security controls and potential attack paths in the same place.

With the Picus, validation is no longer a once-a-year box to check. It’s a continuous, always-on process. Stop testing like it’s 2010. Start defending like it’s 2025.

Discover your real security posture. Request a demo.

Sponsored and written by Picus Security.