Beyond the Sprint: The Power of Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART)

Malicious threat actors don’t work a 9-to-5 schedule, and they definitely don’t take a break when your organization’s annual security assessments are complete. Instead, they constantly put your security posture to the test—day after day, month after month, all year long. 

That’s why annual penetration tests and periodic validation campaigns are insufficient in today’s threat landscape. Instead, organizations must look to embed a more proactive approach to validation into the very fabric of their security operations by incorporating Continuous Automated Red Teaming (CART).

In the blog below, we’ll outline how CART provides continuous validation to augment human Red Teams and help organizations develop a more proactive security program.

The Critical Gap: Shelf Life of Security Findings

A traditional Red Team engagement is typically a time-boxed exercise. A team of ethical hackers is given a specific scope and a limited time frame—usually between two and four weeks—to find a path to a predefined objective, like data exfiltration. It’s an intense, valuable sprint.

Once that sprint is over, the Red Team delivers a report with their findings, and the Blue Team begins remediation activities aimed at shoring up any identified gaps and areas of concern. However, the insights gleaned by the Red Team’s activities have a very real shelf life. As soon as the environment changes, a new vulnerability is found, or a misconfiguration emerges, the findings become stale and new gaps redevelop unseen. The continuous nature of CART aims to eliminate that shelf life.

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Operationalizing the Red Team Mindset

How Continuous Automated Red Teaming Works 

The core concept of CART is focused on reversing the adversary’s advantage by matching the diligence and consistency of their operations. It does this by automating the intelligence and methodology of a Red Team through the use of a sophisticated platform.

• Augmentation, Not Replacement: CART leverages automated breach and attack simulation (BAS) to mimic the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of a human Red Team in a safe, automated, and continuous manner. It augments a human Red Team’s activities by ensuring machine-driven validation is constantly running.
• A Continuous Playbook: A human Red Team has an arsenal of attack simulations they use to bypass controls, move laterally, and exfiltrate data. CART takes that playbook and automates it, running these simulations constantly, day and night, against your entire environment.
• Prioritized Data: CART platforms prioritize the most relevant attacks based on threat intelligence—integrating principles like those used in adversarial exposure validation (AEV)—and provide immediate, actionable feedback when a control fails or a new exposure is identified.

Real-World Impact: The SOC Advantage

To understand the impact, consider a Security Operations Center (SOC) that has just deployed a new endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution. With Continuous Automated Red Teaming, that EDR is continuously tested against hundreds of thousands of known adversary TTPs, like a specific technique for bypassing process injection or a new way to evade detection. 

In the same way, if a new EDR rule or configuration is deployed, a CART platform immediately validates its effectiveness. In the event the rule broke something or resulted in a failure to detect a critical exposure, the SOC team would be alerted instantly, not days or weeks later.

This means that while your security posture constantly evolves and adapts, it is always being validated. Ultimately, this dramatically reduces the time to detect and remediate security control gaps.

From Nice-to-Have to Mandatory

CART empowers security teams to be truly proactive. It moves the organization from a reactive, firefighting mode to a strategic, data-driven optimization mode. This provides:

• Quantitative Evidence: Clear data that can be used to report to the board, support compliance, and justify current or new security investments.
• Operational Confidence: You always know your true risk posture against active threats. Instead of guessing or hoping your security controls work as expected, CART validates them continuously.
• True Resilience: The continuous feedback loop drives enduring cyber resilience.

For security leaders, the message is clear: It’s not just awareness; it’s readiness and operational confidence. The most resilient organizations are running CART to ensure their entire security ecosystem is always being tested against the latest and greatest threats.

Are you ready to augment your security team and ensure your defenses are always being validated? Check out the SafeBreach Exposure Validation Platform solution brief, then schedule a personalized demo to see how the SafeBreach platform can help you operationalize the Red Team mindset 24/7.