They recommended a red team engagement — what is it, and how does it differ from a pentest at our scale?

A pentest is like an inventory audit; it uncovers ports, services, and coding bugs, then hands you a report so you can patch them. A red team operation focuses on staying undetected. It executes the attack piecemeal to avoid tripping your firewall or antivirus alerts. If you don't have a SIEM analyzing logs or dedicated staff actively monitoring alerts, no one will spot the attack anyway, making the entire test pointless.

Last year, driven by a similar ambition, we spent 210.000 TL on a red team engagement for our 80-person e-commerce infrastructure. The result? An employee clicked a fake shipping email, and the testers escalated straight to domain admin rights. Eighty percent of the findings could have been resolved with basic staff awareness training and tighter privilege management. We ended up wishing we had put that money into finishing our backup strategy and server isolation instead.

Sounds like a vendor trying to hit their quarterly quota. Use your current budget to expand the scope of your annual pentest instead; add source code review or API security testing, for example. Jumping from the 65.000 TL range straight to 260.000 TL is premature for a company your size.

What kind of scenario did the vendor propose? How many weeks are they planning for, and does the scope only cover digital assets, or are physical break-ins and phone-based social engineering included too? Those specifics make a massive difference in price.

A business needs to meet three criteria before it's ready for a red team engagement: 1) Critical and high-severity findings from regular pentests have been completely remediated, 2) There is an active, centralized logging and alerting system monitoring the corporate network 24/7, and 3) There is a tested incident response plan detailing who does what during a breach.

they did this at my old company too the accountant handed over the password right away cause the email looked like it came from the ceo. honestly totally agree, u dont need to drop a quarter million lira to figure that out.

Consulting shops keep pushing flashy packages like red teaming or purple teaming because margins on standard pentests have tanked. If there's no defensive team in place, who are they playing against? They're basically scoring on an empty net and handing you an invoice.

Hold on to your money imo. For a quarter of that cost get your dev team solid secure coding training and put the rest toward upgrading your vulnerability scanners. Even running an internal security awareness session will do more for you than that report ever would.

There is something to watch out for. If you get three different answers on a topic, the question was asked wrong.

An automated scan report is not the same as a penetration test. Good luck with that.

Sorry, but this doesn't apply in every case. Having backups accessible on the same network and with the same identity makes them part of the target.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Let me share my experience. When making decisions, write down the worst-case scenario too, not just the best.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

My questions are cleared up, thanks.

We got stuck at the same point for a while. The biggest time-waster for us was not knowing who had the final say.

That's all, sorry if I went on too long.

We need to make a distinction here. If permission and scope aren't in writing, don't start that test.

If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

Good call starting this thread. Most incidents start with a leaked password, not a vulnerability.

If I understood correctly, you're saying: The real issue isn't the number, but what it's based on.

Yes, that's exactly how it is with what is a red team. Any unwritten clause becomes a point of disagreement later, as both sides remember it differently.

This is my opinion, I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.

exactly like that. tbh any unwritten clause becomes a point of disagreement later as both sides remember it differently.

if you post the result here it will help others too.