Pen Testing vs. Red Teaming: Which One Does Your Business Need?

The challenge of securing your business

As the world of cyber continues to change, threats aren’t just becoming more sophisticated, they’re becoming harder to detect. Whether it’s a well-planned attack that slips past your defences, or a known vulnerability in your system, the question is: how do you test your security before an attacker does?

Two of the most effective approaches that Bulletproof offers are penetration testing and red teaming, and which one you choose depends on what your business is trying to achieve.

What’s your security goal?

Before deciding between pen testing or red teaming, you need to determine:

The process evaluates several critical areas:

• Do you want to identify specific vulnerabilities and fix them?
• Do you want to see if your business can survive a real-world attack?

Although at first these might sound similar, they lead to very different security assessments.

If your organisation’s main concern is identifying weaknesses in your system, a penetration test is probably the best place to start. It’s a controlled way to pinpoint flaws, from misconfigurations, an outdated system, to weak access controls.

But if you want to know how well your security team can defend against a real attack, then a red team engagement is the better option. Instead of just looking for weaknesses, a red team will think and act like a real cyber attacker, blending hacking, social engineering, and stealth tactics to test your business’s response to an attack.

So, what is your goal? Fixing known issues? Or stress-testing your systems with real attack scenarios?

Finding and fixing vulnerabilities (penetration testing)

If your security goal is to uncover flaws in your system, a penetration test (or pen test) is the way to go. Think of it as a controlled, ethical cyberattack designed to expose weaknesses in your systems but without the chaos of an actual breach.

• What it does: a team of pen testers (aka ethical hackers) will attempt to break into your network, applications, or infrastructure using the same techniques employed by cybercriminals. But instead of causing damage, they document their findings.
• What you get: their findings are collated in a detailed report outlining the vulnerabilities they come across, the risk level of each vulnerability, and a guide on how to fix them.
• Best for: it’s ideal for businesses that need to meet certain compliance requirements, to check the security of a new system before launch, or to simply tighten up the overall security of their network.

Why penetration testing matters

You can think of a pen test like a health check for your cyber security, and just like a regular checkup, potential health issues can be detected before they have a chance to turn serious. Put simply, it’s a proactive and preventative approach that is essential for staying ahead of threats.

When should you get a penetration test?

• You need a compliance-mandated security test (e.g. PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2).
• You want to assess a specific system, application, or network for vulnerabilities.
• You’re launching a new product, service, or infrastructure and need to ensure it is secure before it goes live.

Rather than it being a one-off, it is important to regularly conduct penetration tests. And how often you should test your security depends on factors such as the industry your business is in, regulatory requirements, and how frequently your systems are updated or changed.

If you’re still unsure about the testing frequency that’s right for your business, take a read of our blog post on how often you should conduct penetration testing for a deeper dive.

Testing your defence against a real-world attack (red team engagement)

If you want to go beyond finding and fixing vulnerabilities within your system and see how well your business can withstand a real cyberattack, then a red team engagement is what you need.

What makes red teaming different?

Whilst a pen test highlights and reports on security flaws, a red team engagement is a full-scale adversarial threat-led simulation where ethical hackers behave like real-world threat actors to test not just your systems but your employees and processes too.

• What it does: a red team will operate like a threat actor to breach your organisation’s systems, using a mix of stealth tactics, hacking, and social engineering techniques.
• What you get: with red teaming you get a true-to-life attack simulation that tests how well your business detects, responds to, and recovers from an intrusion.
• Best for: it’s ideal for organisations that already have security measures in place and want to stress test them under real attack conditions.

When should you choose red team engagement?

Whilst a pen test highlights and reports on security flaws, a red team engagement is a full-scale adversarial threat-led simulation where ethical hackers behave like real-world threat actors to test not just your systems but your employees and processes too.

• You want to test your system and security team’s ability to detect and respond to threats in real time.
• You suspect that attackers could bypass your current defences and need to know how.
• You want to assess more than just your technology – your employees, physical security and human vulnerabilities (social engineering) matter too.

For a business with mature security programs, red team engagement is ideal. These are businesses that have addressed basic vulnerabilities and now want to put their defences through a real-world stress test.

Would your security team spot a threat before it’s too late? A red team engagement can give you that answer!

Pen Test vs. Red Team: Understanding the key differences

While pen testing and red teaming both help to improve your security, as you are now aware, they serve very different purposes. Here’s how they stack up against each other:

Pen Test vs. Red Team: Understanding the key differences

Factor	Penetration Testing	Red Team Engagement
Objective	Identify and fix vulnerabilities	Test detection and overall security resilience to real-world attacks
Scope	Focused on defined systems such as web apps, cloud infrastructure, networks, etc	Broad attack surface including people, technology, processes, and physical security
Approach	Controlled and systematic simulated attacks on systems	Threat-led, adversarial simulation with stealth
Techniques	Vulnerability scanning, exploitation, misconfiguration testing	Hacking, phishing, social engineering, and even physical security breaches
Best for	Compliance, vulnerability assessment, security validation	Testing detection & response, assessing real-world security posture