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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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."
6. 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.
7. 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.