Emulating the Enemy – How Adversary Emulation is Elevating Offensive Security
In the world of cybersecurity, a fundamental shift is underway in how organizations test their defenses. It’s no longer enough to run generic penetration tests or vulnerability scans and call it a day. With advanced persistent threats (APTs), ransomware gangs, and other adversaries developing specialized tactics, security teams are realizing the need to think and act like those attackers. This has given rise to the practice of adversary emulation – a form of offensive security testing that goes beyond finding common bugs, instead focusing on simulating the specific behaviors of real threat actors. In this article, we’ll discuss what adversary emulation is, why it’s gaining traction as a critical component of security programs, and how it’s helping organizations shore up their defenses against modern attacks. We’ll also explore practical steps to get started with adversary emulation and the benefits it brings through examples and current trends.
From Pen Testing to Adversary Emulation
Traditional penetration testing typically involves testers looking for as many vulnerabilities as possible in a given timeframe. Adversary emulation, on the other hand, is more scenario-based. It asks the question: “What would it look like if a specific threat group targeted us, and could they succeed?” Rather than hunting broadly for any and all weaknesses, adversary emulation uses threat intelligence about real attackers to guide a structured simulation of an attack, step by step.
For example, consider a financial institution worried about APTs from nation-states. A conventional pen test might reveal common issues like outdated software or misconfigured servers. An adversary emulation exercise, however, would dig into how an espionage group (say, similar to North Korea’s Lazarus Group) might attempt to infiltrate that bank. The simulation team would study Lazarus Group’s known tactics – perhaps spear-phishing employees with malware-laced documents, using stolen credentials to move laterally, and then quietly exfiltrating sensitive data. They would then emulate those actions: send realistic phishing emails to see if anyone clicks, test if malware can evade detection on the bank’s systems, attempt lateral movement and data access using methods Lazarus is known for. The end goal isn’t simply to find vulnerabilities, but to evaluate the organization’s detection and response against a specific threat’s methods.
This approach is often powered by frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, which catalogs the tactics and techniques used by countless threat actors. Security teams can map an adversary’s playbook from ATT&CK and create an “emulation plan” – essentially a script of how to mimic that adversary’s campaign. MITRE’s Center for Threat-Informed Defense even provides adversary emulation plans for certain APT groups, making it easier to structure these exercises.
Why Adversary Emulation Matters Now
Several developments in the threat landscape have driven the rise of adversary emulation:
Targeted Attacks are the Norm: In the past, many attacks were opportunistic – hackers would scan the internet for any victim with a known weakness. Today, we see more targeted, human-operated attacks. Ransomware gangs, for instance, hand-pick targets that are likely to pay large ransoms (like hospitals or critical infrastructure) and then manually orchestrate multi-step intrusions. They aren’t just exploiting one vulnerability; they’re using a suite of techniques – phishing, credential theft, privilege escalation, data exfiltration – custom-tailored to each victim. Adversary emulation allows defenders to test their readiness for such multi-faceted, targeted operations by replicating them beforehand.
Emergence of Advanced Cybercrime Groups: The line between nation-state APT and organized cybercrime has blurred. For example, the Scattered Spider group – a criminal hacking crew – used social engineering and SIM swapping to breach telecom and casino companies with techniques as sophisticated as some espionage actorsreuters.com. They caused major incidents like the MGM Resorts breach. When criminal groups start employing advanced tactics, it’s a signal that every enterprise might face APT-level techniques even from non-nation-state attackers. Adversary emulation prepares organizations for that reality by not just testing generic cyber hygiene, but by staging the kind of attacks these groups carry out.
Post-Breach Mindset (“Assume Breach”): There’s a growing acceptance in the security community of the “assume breach” mindset – the idea that determined adversaries will eventually bypass preventative controls. What matters is how quickly you detect and contain them. Adversary emulation directly supports this mindset. By simulating an attacker already in your environment (e.g., someone who managed to get in via a phishing email), you can test how effective your detection and response capabilities are. Do your SOC analysts catch the simulated data exfiltration? Does your SIEM generate an alert when the red team uses mimikatz to dump credentials? If not, you have valuable lessons to improve upon. Essentially, adversary emulation helps answer the question: “If we were breached in the way attackers are breaching others right now, would we know, and what would we do?”
Regulators and Frameworks Encouraging It: While still a relatively new practice, there’s movement in industry standards towards more realistic testing. For instance, financial regulators in some regions have introduced threat-led penetration testing regimes (like CBEST in the UK) which are, in essence, adversary emulation programs for critical financial institutions using real threat intel. Additionally, frameworks like NIST SP 800-53 now emphasize the importance of red team exercises and scenario-based tests. This is nudging organizations to adopt adversary emulation as part of best practices, not just as an experimental exercise.
Benefits of Adversary Emulation
Adversary emulation offers several benefits that complement traditional penetration testing and other security assessments:
Holistic Defense Testing: It doesn’t just test if a system has a vulnerability; it tests the entire kill-chain. This means you’re examining people, process, and technology. A normal vulnerability scan won’t tell you if your employees would fall for a sophisticated phishing email – adversary emulation will. It will show you if your SOC can detect lateral movement, or if your EDR (Endpoint Detection & Response) can catch malware behavior. In short, it validates your security controls against realistic attack patterns end-to-end. You discover not only technical weaknesses, but also gaps in monitoring, incident response procedures, or user awareness.
Threat-Focused Prioritization: Because adversary emulation starts with specific threats of concern, it helps an organization prioritize defenses against those most likely to target them. For example, if you’re a healthcare provider worried about ransomware gangs like Ryuk or Conti, an emulation can focus on the tools and techniques those groups use (e.g., TrickBot infections leading to ransomware deployment). If the test finds that those techniques work against you, that’s a clear sign to bolster defenses in certain areas (like improving phishing resistance or network segmentation to stop ransomware spread). It cuts through the noise – rather than fixing 100 miscellaneous findings that may or may not be used by real attackers, you fix the things that you know actual bad guys would exploit in an actual attack scenario.
Improved Detection and Response: Adversary emulation blurs the line between offensive testing and defensive training. When you run an exercise, your defensive team gets an opportunity to see what a real attack looks like (in a safe setting) and practice responding. Many organizations integrate their blue team (defenders) into these exercises in a purple team fashion – where red (offense) and blue (defense) work together to iterate and improve. For instance, the red team runs a certain attack technique; if the blue team misses it, the exercise isn’t over – they discuss why it was missed and perhaps tweak logging rules or alert thresholds, then red team might run it again to see if the detection triggers. This collaborative loop greatly enhances the organization’s detection capabilities. In essence, each adversary emulation exercise is also a training drill for the SOC. Over time, the security team becomes much more adept at recognizing and stopping malicious activities because they’ve seen and practiced against them.
Executive and Stakeholder Insight: The output of an adversary emulation is often very narrative and impactful. Instead of a long list of CVEs, you get a storyline: “We conducted a simulation of APT X. Here’s how far they got... They managed to access our crown jewels data because XYZ.” This kind of result resonates with executives and boards in a way technical vulnerability lists often do not. It paints a clear picture of risk: if this were a real attack, here’s what would have happened. That can motivate faster investment in security improvements and helps translate cybersecurity into business impact. It’s much more compelling to hear “an attacker could steal 1 million customer records from our database” than “SSL certificate validation is missing on server ABC” – adversary emulation provides the former perspective.
Real-World Example: Emulating a Ransomware Attack
To illustrate, consider a company that decides to emulate a ransomware group, given the current threat landscape. They choose the LockBit ransomware gang for their exercise, as LockBit has been extremely active in targeting companies across various sectors. Here’s how they approach it:
Intelligence Gathering: The security team gathers intel on LockBit’s known tactics. Reports indicate LockBit operators often gain entry via phishing or by exploiting unpatched VPN devices. Once in, they use tools like Mimikatz for credential theft, disable security software, then deploy their ransomware enterprise-wide via domain controllers.
Planning: They outline an emulation plan: a) Start with a phishing email to the IT helpdesk (to see if user credentials can be harvested). b) If successful, use the harvested credentials in a lab setting to simulate VPN access (testing whether MFA and other controls would stop it). c) Once “inside,” simulate running Mimikatz and other post-exploitation – will the SOC detect it? d) Finally, mimic the ransomware detonation (they won’t actually encrypt files, but they might drop benign test files or flags on various systems to represent “encrypted” files, to see how long it takes the team to notice).
Execution: The red team carries this out. Suppose the helpdesk employee does click the phishing link and enters credentials – but the organization had MFA, so the red team cannot use those creds on the VPN without that second factor. This is already a useful finding: the phishing was successful (indicating user training could improve), but MFA saved the day for external access – a good validation of that control. The red team then explores an alternate path: perhaps the company has an outdated VPN appliance – they attempt a known exploit on it, and it works, getting them a foothold without credentials. Now inside the network, they try dumping credentials and moving laterally.
Detection & Outcome: During the exercise, the blue team might detect certain actions. Maybe the SOC’s EDR flagged the Mimikatz attempt on a server and they responded by isolating that host – great. But perhaps the simulated ransomware deployment went unnoticed in the noise, or the team wasn’t sure how to respond to an alert about mass file modifications which, in a real case, would be encryption. These observations are debriefed. The result might be a mix of good news (“MFA prevented one initial access vector, EDR caught credential dumping”) and bad news (“Our lateral movement monitoring is weak, and we lack an automated response to ransomware behavior in progress”).
From this single exercise, the company learns invaluable lessons and can take specific actions: patch the VPN appliance, improve phishing training, fine-tune EDR to better alert on ransomware-like behavior, and practice their incident response playbook for a ransomware scenario. This level of thorough testing and learning simply cannot be achieved through a basic vulnerability scan or a generic pen test that isn’t emulating a real adversary scenario.
Getting Started with Adversary Emulation
For organizations interested in adversary emulation, here are some steps and best practices to begin:
Leverage Frameworks and Libraries: Use resources like the MITRE ATT&CK framework and available adversary emulation plans. MITRE’s Adversary Emulation Library provides ready-made plans for certain threats, which can jump-start your exercises. These plans detail what techniques to emulate and in what sequence for a given threat group.
Define Threat Scenarios: Pick one or two threat actor scenarios that are most relevant. If you are in finance, you might choose an APT known to target banks; if in healthcare, maybe a ransomware crew active against hospitals. You can also emulate insider threats or supply chain attacks, depending on your risk concerns. Clearly define the objective of the adversary in the scenario (e.g., steal customer data, deploy ransomware, etc.), as that will shape the simulation.
Assemble the Right Team: Adversary emulation can be done by in-house red teams if you have them, or you can hire specialized firms that offer “threat simulation” services. In-house teams have the advantage of knowing the environment (and also being available to retest improvements), whereas external specialists bring a fresh perspective and often more experience with specific threat behaviors. Many organizations do a mix – maintaining an internal purple team capability for continuous exercises, and occasionally bringing in external experts for a big, annual threat simulation (this is analogous to still having an annual big pen test, but one that is threat-focused).
Collaborate (Purple Teaming): Especially on initial runs, consider a purple team approach, where the red team performs the emulation steps in a somewhat transparent way, allowing the blue team to observe and learn in real time. This is more of a training exercise than a stealth test, but it can rapidly improve the blue team’s skills. Later, you can do a more covert test to truly see if the blue team catches on without being told – essentially validating the lessons learned.
Tools and Environment: Use a controlled environment for dangerous actions if needed. For instance, if you’re going to test malware or exploits, you might do some of that in a lab that mirrors production, to avoid accidentally causing disruption. However, it’s ideal to test in production-like conditions (with proper approvals and fail-safes) because that’s where real adversaries operate. Tools like MITRE Caldera or other breach-and-attack simulation software can automate parts of adversary emulation safely. They can emulate techniques (like executing known attacker commands) in a contained manner and report what was detected or not.
Measure and Iterate: After each exercise, document what was successful (from the red perspective) and what was detected/stopped (from the blue perspective). Translate those into action items. Perhaps you discovered a gap in monitoring of PowerShell scripts or found that the team had no visibility into DNS tunneling used for C2 (Command and Control) in the simulation. Each identified gap should feed into your security improvements – whether it’s deploying a new tool, enabling a log source, writing a new detection rule, or conducting training. Then, plan to repeat the emulation or try a new one after improvements are made. The goal is continuous improvement; adversary emulation is not one-and-done. Many companies run these simulations quarterly or biannually for different scenarios.
Conclusion
Adversary emulation represents a maturation of offensive security practices – moving from a vulnerability-centric view to a threat-centric view. By emulating the enemy, organizations can obtain a realistic assessment of how they would fare against the kinds of attacks that are actually occurring every day around the world. This approach shines a light on not just technical flaws, but also on detection and response weaknesses, thereby strengthening the entire security lifecycle.
In a time where breaches are often not due to a single unpatched server but a chain of sophisticated actions by determined attackers, adversary emulation is our best training ground. It’s a proactive way to answer the question, “Could we detect and stop a skilled attacker who does X, Y, and Z?” – and if the answer is no, to then directly inform how to fix that.
Offensive security is no longer just about finding open ports and SQL injections; it’s about understanding adversaries at a deeper level. Just as militaries conduct war games to prepare for real conflicts, cyber defenders must conduct cyber war games through adversary emulation. Those who do will be far better prepared for the day when a real attacker comes knocking. By learning from the enemy’s playbook and practicing against it, we turn our threat intelligence into tangible defensive strength.
Adversary emulation is elevating offensive security from a tactical exercise to a strategic one – aligning it tightly with cyber threat intelligence and defensive strategy. It’s an exciting development that ultimately helps organizations not just find vulnerabilities, but build resilience against the cunning strategies of modern adversaries. As the famous Chinese general Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Adversary emulation is about knowing the enemy and testing yourself – so that you can face the real battles with confidence.
