Campaign Design Principles
Define objective-centric scenarios (data theft, privilege escalation) over vulnerability shopping lists. Chain initial access → pivot → privilege → objective exfil. This is the offensive counterpart to the defensive strategies in our [Incident Response Playbook](/resources/blog/incident-response-playbook-readiness).
Threat Modeling Alignment
Map campaign TTPs to local threat model frequency to maintain executive relevance and reduce perception of “lab theatrics”.
Instrumentation for Learning
Pre-stage logging & canaries to guarantee each executed action has detection learning yield—even if exploitation fails.
Kill Chain Chaining Examples
Illustrate 2–3 representative chained paths to highlight systemic control gaps vs isolated misconfigs.
Remediation Packaging
Deliver grouped “attack path compression epics” with owner, risk delta narrative, and detection coverage after fix hypothesis.
Metrics
Time-to-detection per phase, number of unique privilege escalation avenues, repeat finding rate, attack path length delta after remediation.
Sources & Further Reading
MITRE ATT&CK (technique mapping).
CISA Red Team/Assessment Methodologies.
MITRE D3FEND (defensive linkage).
Key Takeaways
High-fidelity emulation compresses risk when outputs are operationalized into engineering epics and detection hypotheses.