Red Team
A security team or firm that simulates realistic attacks against a protocol or organization to uncover exploitable weaknesses before real attackers do.
A red team is a group, either internal or an independently hired third-party firm, tasked with simulating realistic adversarial attacks against a protocol, smart contract system, or organization, specifically to uncover exploitable weaknesses before genuine malicious actors find and exploit them. Unlike a standard code audit (see Kaavon's "Audit Firm" glossary definition), which systematically reviews code for known classes of vulnerabilities, red-team engagements often emulate the mindset and tactics of a genuine attacker, including testing operational and social-engineering weaknesses alongside purely technical ones.
Red-team exercises are commonly used to complement, not replace, a formal smart contract audit and bug bounty (see Kaavon's "Bug Bounty" glossary definition) program, since each approach tends to surface different categories of weaknesses — a red team is particularly well suited to testing how an organization's people, processes, and incident response actually hold up under a realistic, multi-pronged simulated attack, rather than just reviewing code in isolation.
Examples
- A protocol's red-team engagement might test not just its smart contracts but also whether team members can be socially engineered into leaking sensitive operational information.
- Red-team exercises and formal code audits are generally complementary rather than redundant, since each tends to surface different categories of security weakness.