Key Takeaways
Adversary emulation replicates the behaviour, objectives, and decision-making of real-world threat actors.
Effective campaigns are built around realistic attack paths, not predefined test scripts.
Human operators adapt to changing conditions, uncovering risks that automated testing can miss.
Continuous adversary emulation provides ongoing assurance as environments, technologies, and threats evolve.
WRAITH combines threat intelligence, operator expertise, and continuous testing to validate security resilience over time.
On this page
Inside WRAITH Campaigns: Perspectives From a Senior Red Teamer
Before a targeted attacker makes a single move against your organisation, they have spent time understanding it.
- Your industry.
- Your suppliers.
- Your technology stack.
- The credentials sitting in breach databases.
- The services you have left exposed.
- The people in your business whose access makes them worth targeting.
They are not working from a scope document. They are building a picture, and by the time they act, that picture is detailed.
For most enterprise CISOs and security teams, the uncomfortable truth is this: the attacker’s preparation is thorough and ongoing. Your testing, in most cases, is not.
Where Traditional Security Testing Falls Short
A red team engagement runs for a defined period, against a defined scope, and then stops. The report lands. The findings are reviewed. And somewhere in the gap between that engagement and the next one, your environment keeps changing and the threat landscape keeps moving.
That gap is where real risk lives.
Effective adversary emulation is built on the same principles the attacker uses. It starts with understanding your organisation as a target, not as a client. It is shaped by who is actually coming for organisations like yours. And because threats do not pause between your testing windows, it should not either.
Before we execute a single action against your environment, we already know how an attacker would see it. Here is how we get there.
How WRAITH Builds Realistic Adversary Emulation Campaigns
The onboarding phase is not admin. It is where campaigns are won or lost. Before any activity runs, WRAITH operators build a detailed picture of the organisation as an attacker would see it:
- what is exposed,
- what is valuable,
- where the realistic points of entry are.
That context determines everything that follows:
- which threat groups are relevant,
- which attack paths make sense,
- where the campaign should focus.
Because WRAITH runs continuously, that picture is never frozen. As your infrastructure evolves, so does the campaign. You are not being tested against a snapshot of your environment from six months ago.
Threat Intelligence Drives Every Campaign
Once we understand your organisation, we look at the threat groups actively targeting similar ones. We combine that with:
- Open-source intelligence and publicly exposed infrastructure
- Credential exposure and breach data
- Dark web intelligence and ransomware activity
- The techniques, tools, and objectives those groups are using right now
That intelligence does not sit in a report. It feeds directly into how campaigns are designed and updated throughout the year. The result is a continuously updated picture of your real exposure, not a theoretical one.
Threat actors do not wait. Neither do we.
Your Security Priorities Shape the Campaign
Different organisations face different threats. We work with you to understand what matters most, whether that is:
- Validating whether your detections would actually fire
- Assessing your resilience to ransomware
- Mapping how an attacker could move through critical systems
- Meeting the continuous assurance requirements of frameworks like DORA
Campaigns are designed around those priorities. Not around what is easiest to test, and not locked to a window where your team is prepared and waiting.
Why Continuous Adversary Emulation Matters
Point-in-time testing tells you how your defences performed on one day. Continuous adversary emulation tells you how they perform under sustained, realistic pressure, without warning, during normal operations.
Continuous threats demand continuous testing.
Campaigns evolve based on how your environment responds. What controls trigger. What detection logic holds. Where genuine gaps remain. You get live visibility, not a point-in-time snapshot.
The output is not a report full of findings you already knew. It is clear, defensible evidence you can take to leadership, use to prioritise investment, and act on now rather than waiting for the next scheduled engagement.
WRAITH is built for large enterprises that need a continuous, realistic approach to security assurance. Find out how it works and which tier fits your organisation.
Warren Butterworth
Warren is a Lead Penetration Tester specialising in red teaming and adversary emulation. Alongside leading one of Omni's red teams, he is one of the developers behind WRAITH, contributing to the design of its operator-led adversary emulation capabilities. Warren enjoys tackling complex technical challenges and is known for finding creative ways to bypass modern security controls and uncover genuine security risk.
