Offensive Security Assessments & Compliance Strategy & Resilience Industries Approach FAQ Request Scope

Adversary simulation,
executed by senior operators.

Real attackers don't follow your scope diagram. They follow the path of least resistance — chained exploits, forgotten assets, weak assumptions, and the human layer your scanner can't see. Our offensive testing is built to replicate that, not to generate a scanner report with a logo on it.

15+
Years senior experience on every engagement
100%
US-based delivery. Zero offshore handoffs.
~48h
From scoping call to fixed-fee proposal
PTES
OWASP, MITRE ATT&CK, OSSTMM aligned
Methodology Aligned With
PTES
OWASP WSTG
OWASP MASTG
OWASP API Top 10
MITRE ATT&CK
NIST SP 800-115
OSSTMM
// Core Offensive Services

Tested the way
you'll actually be attacked.

Every Adversim offensive engagement is led by a senior practitioner — no junior staff running scanners and shipping the export. Below are the engagements clients ask for most. If your scenario isn't listed, we'll scope it.

/ 01 — EXTERNAL NETWORK

External Network Penetration Testing

We attack your internet-facing perimeter the way real adversaries do — starting with reconnaissance against your public attack surface (often larger than you think), enumerating exposed services, and chaining vulnerabilities into meaningful access.

Engagements include shadow IT discovery, credential exposure searches across breach corpuses and paste sites, email/VPN attack vectors, password spray and credential stuffing, and validation of any external service that touches your environment — including the forgotten subdomain spun up by marketing in 2019.

Typical Scope15–25 external IPs / hosts
Engagement Window2–4 weeks
Best ForAnnual compliance / posture baseline
DeliverablesExecutive + technical report, debrief
// METHODOLOGY
How we run external tests
  • 01OSINT & attack surface mapping — known and shadow assets
  • 02Service enumeration, version fingerprinting, vulnerability triage
  • 03Credential exposure review across breach corpuses
  • 04Password spray, MFA bypass testing, auth abuse paths
  • 05Exploitation, chaining, and proof-of-impact (no destructive payloads)
  • 06Critical-finding escalation within 4 business hours of discovery
/ 02 — INTERNAL NETWORK

Internal Network Penetration Testing

What can a malicious insider — or any attacker who landed one phishing click — actually accomplish inside your network? Internal engagements assume initial access and answer that question with precision.

Active Directory abuse paths (Kerberoasting, AS-REP, ACL chains, certificate services), lateral movement, privilege escalation, sensitive data discovery, and validation of detection & response gaps. Most clients are surprised by how quickly Domain Admin is reachable. We are not.

Typical ScopeSingle AD forest, /24–/22 subnet
Engagement Window2–3 weeks
Best ForMature programs validating depth-of-defense
DeliverablesAttack path diagrams + remediation roadmap
// COMMON FINDINGS
What we find in 9 out of 10 internal engagements
  • !Kerberoastable service accounts with weak passwords
  • !Active Directory Certificate Services misconfiguration (ESC1–ESC8)
  • !Excessive ACL rights enabling silent privilege escalation
  • !Legacy protocols (LLMNR, NBT-NS, NTLMv1) enabling relay attacks
  • !Shared local admin credentials across the fleet
  • !Sensitive data on file shares with "Everyone" read access
/ 03 — WEB APPLICATION

Web Application Penetration Testing

Authenticated, business-logic-aware testing against your most critical web applications. We go far beyond the OWASP Top 10 checklist — we map your application's actual privilege model, identify the assumptions developers made about how users behave, and methodically break them.

IDOR and broken access control, server-side request forgery, server-side template injection, race conditions, authentication and session flaws, API endpoints exposed by the front-end, JWT and SSO abuse, and multi-tenant isolation testing for SaaS platforms.

Typical Scope1–3 web apps + supporting APIs
Engagement Window2–4 weeks per application
Best ForSaaS, fintech, healthtech, e-commerce
Aligned ToOWASP WSTG v4.2, OWASP ASVS, OWASP API Top 10
// SCOPE COVERAGE
What we test in a web engagement
  • Authentication, session management, MFA enforcement
  • Authorization model & horizontal/vertical privilege escalation
  • Input validation: injection, deserialization, file upload
  • Business logic flaws & race conditions
  • Cryptographic implementation, JWT handling, key management
  • Multi-tenant data isolation (SaaS-specific)
  • Client-side issues: XSS, CSRF, CSP, DOM-based attacks
/ 04 — RED TEAM & ADVERSARY SIMULATION

Red Teaming & Adversary Simulation

A penetration test asks "what's vulnerable?" A red team asks "can we achieve a specific business objective without your defenders catching us?" Objective-based, time-boxed, threat-actor-emulated operations designed to test your detection and response — not just your patch hygiene.

Engagements are scoped against MITRE ATT&CK TTPs relevant to your industry's actual threat actors (ransomware operators for healthcare; financially-motivated APTs for fintech; nation-state TTPs for defense contractors), with executive-defined "crown jewel" objectives.

Typical ScopeMulti-vector, objective-based
Engagement Window6–12 weeks
Best ForValidating SOC & IR maturity
VariantsFull red team · Purple team · Assumed-breach
// OBJECTIVE EXAMPLES
What a red team objective looks like
  • Exfiltrate a sample of patient records from EHR backend
  • Achieve Domain Admin and demonstrate ransomware staging
  • Access executive email and demonstrate wire transfer fraud capability
  • Bypass the casino floor's gaming system integrity controls
  • Compromise the source code repository & CI/CD pipeline
  • Demonstrate physical access leading to network foothold
// Specialized Engagements

Beyond the basics —
where the modern attack surface lives.

Networks and web apps are table stakes. The vulnerabilities that actually breach organizations in 2026 hide in cloud configurations, mobile attack surfaces, AI integrations, and the gap between your security awareness training and your employees' inboxes.

/ 05 — MOBILE

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

iOS and Android testing covering static and dynamic analysis, local data storage, certificate pinning, IPC abuse, deep linking, and authentication flaws specific to mobile platforms.

iOS Android OWASP MASTG
/ 06 — API

API Penetration Testing

REST, GraphQL, and gRPC testing against the OWASP API Security Top 10 — BOLA, broken authentication, excessive data exposure, mass assignment, and rate-limiting bypasses that scanners miss.

REST GraphQL OWASP API Top 10
/ 07 — CLOUD

Cloud Penetration Testing (AWS / Azure / GCP)

Identity and access misconfigurations, privilege escalation through IAM chains, public storage exposure, container and serverless attack paths, and lateral movement across accounts and subscriptions.

AWS Azure GCP Kubernetes
/ 08 — WIRELESS

Wireless Network Penetration Testing

WPA2/WPA3 attack validation, evil-twin and rogue AP testing, captive portal abuse, guest-to-corporate network pivots, and Bluetooth / IoT device exposure on your perimeter.

WPA3 802.1X IoT
/ 09 — PHYSICAL & SE

Physical Security & Social Engineering

Badge cloning, tailgating, lockpicking, and on-site reconnaissance combined with phishing, vishing, and pretexting campaigns. We test the human and physical layers together, the way real attackers do.

Phishing Vishing Tailgating
/ 10 — AI / LLM

AI & LLM Penetration Testing

Prompt injection, indirect prompt injection through retrieved data, model jailbreaks, training data extraction, tool-use abuse in agentic systems, and the new attack surface introduced when your application integrates an LLM. See full AI services →

OWASP LLM Top 10 RAG Agentic AI
/ 11 — PURPLE TEAM

Purple Team Exercises

Collaborative engagements where our offensive operators work alongside your detection & response team — running real ATT&CK techniques to validate alerting, tune detections, and close visibility gaps in real time.

MITRE ATT&CK SOC tuning EDR validation
/ 12 — ASSUMED BREACH

Assumed-Breach Assessments

We start with the access an attacker would have after a successful phishing campaign — a single workstation, standard user — and demonstrate exactly how far that gets in your environment. Fast, high-signal, low-overhead.

Time-boxed High signal Internal posture
NEW · AI / LLM Offensive Security

When your AI
becomes a new
attack surface.

LLMs and AI systems introduce a category of vulnerabilities that traditional security tools can't see and traditional testers haven't learned to find. Adversim has built a dedicated AI offensive practice aligned to the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS — purpose-built for organizations deploying AI into customer-facing, decision-critical, or regulated environments.

01

LLM / AI Model Security Assessment

A comprehensive security evaluation of a target LLM or AI model, probing for jailbreaks, prompt leakage, training data extraction, model inversion, and unsafe output generation. We combine automated tooling with manual adversarial techniques to find what fuzzers and benchmarks miss.

OWASP LLM Top 10 MITRE ATLAS 1–2 weeks
Attack Techniques
  • Jailbreak attacks via roleplay & instruction override
  • System prompt & context leakage
  • Training data extraction
  • Model inversion & inference attacks
  • Unsafe / policy-violating output induction
Tools & Frameworks
  • Garak · PyRIT
  • PromptBench · LLM Fuzzer
  • MITRE ATLAS TTP mapping
  • Custom adversarial prompt libraries
02

AI Red Teaming

Adversim operators simulate sophisticated adversaries targeting AI and ML systems using real-world attack chains — adversarial input crafting, model manipulation, inference attacks, data poisoning scenarios, and multi-step prompt campaigns designed to bypass safety controls and achieve unauthorized objectives.

Adversary simulation MITRE ATLAS 2–3 weeks
Attack Techniques
  • Multi-turn adversarial prompting
  • Inference & membership attacks
  • Data poisoning simulation
  • Adversarial input crafting
  • Cross-system lateral movement from AI components
Tools & Frameworks
  • PyRIT · Garak
  • ART (Adversarial Robustness Toolbox)
  • Counterfit
  • Custom red team playbooks
03

AI Application Penetration Test

Authenticated and unauthenticated attacker perspectives against AI-powered applications and APIs. Testing covers traditional vulnerabilities (injection, broken auth, insecure API design) and AI-specific attack vectors — prompt injection, context manipulation, and model abuse across the full stack.

Full-stack OWASP LLM Top 10 ~1 week
Attack Techniques
  • Direct prompt injection
  • Indirect prompt injection via external content
  • API abuse & rate-limit bypass
  • Insecure output handling (XSS / SQLi / RCE)
  • Context window manipulation & hijacking
Tools & Frameworks
  • Burp Suite · OWASP ZAP
  • Garak · PromptFoo
  • Postman / custom API scripts
  • OWASP LLM Top 10 methodology
04

Prompt Injection Testing

A focused, time-boxed engagement dedicated to the #1 ranked LLM vulnerability. We develop payload libraries calibrated to your AI system's architecture, exercise direct and indirect injection vectors, and validate mitigations like input filtering, system prompt hardening, and output validation.

LLM01 Direct + Indirect 3–5 days
Attack Techniques
  • Direct user-input injection
  • Indirect injection via retrieved documents / web
  • System prompt extraction
  • Safety guardrail bypass
  • Tool-use abuse in agentic systems
Tools & Frameworks
  • PromptFoo · Rebuff
  • LLM Guard
  • Custom injection payload libraries
  • OWASP LLM01 methodology
05

AI Supply Chain Assessment

Third-party AI components introduce hidden risks that traditional security reviews miss. We assess pre-trained models for backdoors and poisoned weights, AI libraries for known CVEs and misconfigurations, datasets for integrity, pipelines for trust boundary violations, and AI-as-a-service integrations for upstream compromise.

Third-party risk SBOM 1–2 weeks
Attack Techniques
  • Model backdoor analysis
  • Dependency vulnerability review
  • Dataset integrity assessment
  • Pipeline trust boundary review
  • Third-party AI API risk analysis
Tools & Frameworks
  • ModelScan · Protect AI Guardian
  • Trivy / Grype dependency scanning
  • SBOM analysis tools
  • MITRE ATLAS supply chain TTPs

Standard AI Engagement Deliverables

Every AI offensive engagement ships with the following — calibrated to engagement type and depth.

Executive Summary

Leadership-facing narrative covering AI security posture and key risk themes.

Findings Report

Each finding with attack description, evidence, severity rating, and affected component.

OWASP LLM Top 10 Mapping

All findings mapped to OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS for compliance context.

Attack Chain Documentation

Step-by-step reconstruction with screenshots, payloads, and model responses as evidence.

Remediation Guidance

Prioritized fix recommendations including input validation, prompt hardening, and output filtering.

30-Day Free Retest

One round of free retesting within 30 days of report delivery to validate applied fixes.

Live Working Debrief

Walkthrough with technical and leadership teams to answer questions and align on next steps.

Risk-Rated Severity

Critical / High / Medium / Low / Informational with business impact context for each finding.

Fixed-Fee Pricing

Transparent scope and price written into the proposal — no T&M ambiguity.

// When Offensive Testing Is the Answer

If any of these sound
familiar, let's talk.

Most offensive engagements are driven by one of a handful of business triggers. If you recognize yours below, you're in the right place — and you're not alone.

// 01 — COMPLIANCE

You have a compliance deadline approaching

HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2 Type II, NGCB 5.260, CMMC, or cyber insurance renewal — most regulated frameworks require annual penetration testing. We'll make sure yours actually finds things.

// 02 — DILIGENCE

You're going through M&A diligence

Acquirers increasingly require a recent third-party penetration test. We deliver fast-turn engagements with reports built for diligence — clean, defensible, and remediation-prioritized.

// 03 — NEW DEPLOYMENT

You're launching something new

A new application, cloud migration, AI integration, or customer-facing platform. Pre-launch testing is dramatically cheaper than discovering the same flaws after they're in production.

// 04 — INDUSTRY BREACH

A peer in your industry was just breached

Your board is asking pointed questions. You need a credible answer that's more than "we run scans monthly." A senior-led penetration test is the answer that lands.

// 05 — DETECTION VALIDATION

You've invested in detection — but never tested it

You have EDR, SIEM, a SOC. But has anyone ever actually attacked you to see what alerts fire? Purple team and red team engagements answer that with measurable specificity.

// 06 — CUSTOMER REQUIREMENT

A customer is requiring it

Enterprise procurement is increasingly requiring vendor penetration testing as a contract condition. We provide reports designed to satisfy that requirement without exposing your internal sensitivities.

Ready to find out what's
actually exposed?

A 30-minute scoping call gives us what we need to send a fixed-fee proposal within 48 hours. No commitment, no consulting theater, no junior sales engineer translating questions.

// Offensive FAQ

Common questions
about offensive engagements.

A vulnerability scan is an automated check that produces a list of potential issues — many false positives, no exploitation, no context. A penetration test is performed by a human who validates findings, chains them into real attack paths, demonstrates business impact, and produces a report calibrated to your environment. A scanner might tell you a service is "potentially vulnerable to CVE-2024-X." A penetration test tells you that vulnerability chained with a misconfigured service account leads to Domain Admin in four hours.
A penetration test answers "what's vulnerable in this scope?" A red team answers "can we achieve a specific business objective without being detected?" Red teams are objective-based, time-boxed, broader in scope, and explicitly designed to test your detection & response capabilities — not just your patch hygiene. Most organizations should mature through penetration testing first, then introduce red teaming once they have detection and response programs worth testing.
For most engagements: a count of in-scope IPs / URLs / cloud accounts, the type of testing desired (black-box / grey-box / white-box), authentication context (will testers be given accounts?), business hours and maintenance windows, and the business driver behind the test. We can usually scope from a 30-minute call. We're happy to sign your NDA first.
We're explicit about destructive testing in every engagement letter. By default we avoid denial-of-service conditions, destructive payloads, and exploitation that risks data integrity — unless you specifically request and authorize them (typical for staging or pre-production environments). Critical findings discovered during testing are escalated within 4 business hours so you can act immediately if needed.
Yes — and we encourage it for purple team engagements. For standard penetration tests, we run daily or twice-weekly check-ins where we share what we've found, what we're working on, and any critical issues that need immediate attention. For red team engagements, we typically maintain a small "white cell" of stakeholders aware of the operation while keeping defenders blind so the detection test is valid.
Most network and application penetration tests fall between $15,000 and $50,000 depending on scope. Red team operations and large multi-vector engagements range from $50,000 to $250,000. Specialized work like AI/LLM testing or assumed-breach engagements typically scope between $20,000 and $60,000. Every engagement is fixed-fee with scope clearly written in the proposal — no T&M ambiguity.
Yes. A retest of remediated findings is included in every engagement at no additional cost when performed within 90 days of report delivery. We re-validate each finding and update the report with confirmed remediation status — giving you a clean deliverable for auditors, customers, or your board.
AI/LLM testing is one of the fastest-evolving areas of offensive security. We test against the OWASP LLM Top 10 plus current research on prompt injection, indirect prompt injection through retrieved content, model jailbreaks, tool-use abuse in agentic systems, and training data extraction. We're particularly focused on the integration layer — how your application uses an LLM is usually where the actual risk lives, not in the model itself.
// Other Adversim Pillars

Offensive testing is one
part of the picture.

Finding what's broken is half the work. Aligning to frameworks and building a security program that prevents the next round of findings is the other half. Explore our other two service pillars.