Red teaming
Red teaming is an authorized exercise in which a team emulates an adversary to examine how an organization's defenses perform against an agreed objective.
Work toward an adversary’s objective
A red team follows paths an attacker might use to reach an agreed objective. The exercise can reveal both successful attacks and effective defenses, as the NIST glossary explains. The useful result is an account of how the organization responded along that path, not just a list of weaknesses.
An objective might be access to a designated test document. An approved recovery request is then an intermediate result; the team still needs to demonstrate access to the document. If testing stops at the recovery decision, the report should make that limit clear.
The objective does not override the scope
Rules of engagement set eligible systems, permitted actions, contacts, stopping conditions, and evidence handling. Social engineering, changes to production accounts, and access to sensitive data need explicit decisions. A business objective is not permission to try any route to it.
The report should explain where the team started, which access was supplied, what it reached, and where defenders interrupted it. That gives the reader enough context to understand both the attack and the response.
How this differs from nearby terms
Penetration testing usually concentrates on demonstrating exploitable weaknesses in a defined target. Adversary emulation describes how documented attacker behavior informs an exercise. Purple teaming describes collaboration between offensive and defensive practitioners. A red-team exercise can include these practices, but the names do not establish its scope.