Thinking Red Team

Red Team

Adversarial security review of systems you are authorized to assess. Attack before an outsider does, but report only what you can actually break: every finding needs a concrete exploit path and a check that the proposed fix closes it.

When to Use

• Security review of code, authentication, authorization, APIs, data handling, or infrastructure you control and are permitted to probe.
• Pre-launch hardening of systems that handle auth, money, personal data, or privileged actions.
• Checking whether a specific vulnerability class (injection, XSS, IDOR, auth bypass, SSRF, secret exposure, etc.) is present with a real path.
• Validating that a claimed control actually blocks the attack, not only that a scanner is quiet.

When NOT to Use

• No authorization to attack the target — stop; do not probe systems you do not own or have written leave to test.
• Speculative "best practice" notes without a reproducible exploit path — drop them; they are not findings.
• Plan, strategy, or decision stress-testing — use pre-mortem (how the plan fails) or steel-manning (strongest case against the decision).
• Architecture resilience without a security objective — use systems or pre-mortem.
• Scanner output alone as a report — patterns are leads; red-team requires an exploit path.
• Non-security root-cause or hypothesis localization — use scientific-method or five-whys-plus.

Procedure

• Confirm authorization and objective. State target, allowed scope, out-of-scope assets, success condition (e.g., unauthorized data read, privilege escalation), and stop rules. Refuse or narrow if authorization is unclear.
• Build the threat model. Name adversary profiles (anonymous external, authenticated user, privileged insider) and their goals under realistic access. Attacks without an actor and goal are noise.
• Map the attack surface. Enumerate entry points and trust boundaries: public endpoints, auth flows, APIs, uploads, admin surfaces, jobs, webhooks, secrets, and data stores. Note exposure and required privileges.
• Trace exploit paths. For each high-value surface, attempt concrete abuse: input manipulation, authz gaps, token/session misuse, injection, SSRF, IDOR, mass assignment, rate-limit bypass, secret leakage. Record exact steps and observed behavior.
• Apply the anti-fabrication gate. Keep a finding only if you can complete: entry point → ordered steps → realized impact on this code/config. Incomplete paths are dropped, not listed as "informational."
• Score severity and attempt defense bypass. Rate impact and exploitability. For each relevant control (rate limit, validation, session check), try a realistic bypass and record held vs broken.
• Prescribe and verify mitigations. For each kept finding, give a minimal concrete fix and state how to re-test that the path is closed. Prefer fixes that remove the exploit precondition. Stop when in-scope surfaces are covered or authorization/budget ends; zero findings is valid.

Output

Target/scope: <in | out | goal | authorization>
Threat model: <actors, access, goals>
Attack surface: <entry points + trust boundaries>
Findings (only complete paths):
  - Title | Severity
    Entry: <endpoint/param/file>
    Steps: <1..n>
    Impact: <realized effect>
    Bypass attempts: <control → result>
    Mitigation: <minimal fix>
    Re-test: <how to confirm closed>
Summary: <kept count; dropped speculative count>

Verification

• Falsify any finding missing entry, steps, or realized impact; treat "could be vulnerable" as non-finding.
• Stop when in-scope attack surfaces are exhausted under authorization, or when re-test shows mitigations close the paths.
• Over-application guard: do not pad with best-practice laundry lists; do not use this skill for non-security plan critique; do not attack without authorization.