• Posted by: Eng. Donya Bino
• February 05, 2026

What Red Team Tools Revealed About the Organization

Red team exercises simulate real-world attackers to find weaknesses before malicious actors do. When the tools are used correctly, they don’t just show “vulnerabilities exist”, they reveal systemic truths about how an organization actually operates, where trust is misplaced, which defenses are paper-thin, and what the real business impact of a breach would be.

Below are the most common (and most painful) revelations that red team tools consistently expose across industries with the exact tools that surface them and practical examples:
1. Legacy & Forgotten Systems Are Still the #1 Entry Point
What gets revealed Old, unpatched, or completely forgotten servers, web apps, VPN endpoints, or internal tools are almost always reachable from the internet or internal network — and they still contain domain admin credentials, clear-text secrets, or exploitable services.
Tools that expose this
1. Nmap + vulners script
2. Nuclei with broad CVE templates
3. Shodan / Censys will allow you to perform an external assessment
4. Responder / Inveigh is capable of capturing NTLM hashes related to legacy protocols

Practical example: During a 2025 engagement, Nmap revealed a previously decommissioned (2019) Jenkins instance left exposed on port 8080 and with a public IP. The use of Nuclei confirmed this instance had a known vulnerability allowing for unauthorized remote code execution (RCE) (CVE-2018-1000861). Red team ran code and discovered clear text AWS keys in build configurations; they then pivoted into the cloud production environment and achieved complete cloud compromise in under 4 hours.

Lesson: Asset inventory is usually fiction. Run periodic external + internal discovery scans, treat anything running on an old OS or framework as an active threat.

2. MFA Exists… But It’s Bypassed in Minutes
What gets revealed Many organizations have MFA deployed, but it’s SMS-based, push-fatigue vulnerable, or missing on high-value accounts (service accounts, break-glass admins, VPN, email gateways).

Tools that demonstrate this
1. MFA Scanner / Briar Gate
2. Phishing Kits (Evilginx2, Modlishka, Muraena)
3. Push Bombing Scripts (Custom Python + Selenium)
4. Adversary-in-the-Middle Kits (AiTM)

Practical example: red teams have used the Evilginx2 phishing page that pretended to be an O365 corporate logon to capture a session token despite the actual time it takes to receive a push from their MFA. The red team logged in as the finance director and approved a $1.2 million wire transfer (simulated).

Lesson:  SMS MFA is just security theatre. Hardware tokens or FIDO2/WebAuthn are the only robust options. Push fatigue is real, train staff to deny unexpected pushes and report them.

3. Short and Obvious Paths to Privilege Escalation
What Will Be Exposed? BloodHound shows that in most organizations, there are about 3-5 hops from a user that has been compromised to reach Domain Admin – typically accomplished through over-privileged service accounts, abuse of Group Policy, or exploiting unconstrained delegation.

Tools to Use to Expose This:
1. BloodHound Community Edition (free) + SharpHound (Collection Utility)
2. PingCastle(free) – Windows Active Directory Audit Tool
3. PowerView/PowerUp (PowerShell – Active Directory Recon)

Example of Disclosure: SharpHound Collection → BloodHound Presentation: Local Admin (on a server) → This server has an Unconstrained Delegation Account → and the Attacker forged a Kerberos ticket to impersonate a domain admin (Exploiting Resource-Based Constrained Delegation). 3 hop path length; Complete compromise time: 45 Minutes.

Lesson: Use BloodHound quarterly, remove Unconstrained Delegation accounts, and perform Audits of service accounts, and adhere to Tiered Admin models. (Tier0/1/2).

4. Phishing from inside an organization has proven to be very effective for phishing.
What was learned. All employees, including trained people, can be fooled into clicking on phishing messages when the phishing arrives in an email that contains the organization's look and feel, and the sender is spoofed to appear like it originated within the organization and the sender has created a sense of urgency to get the receiver to act upon their request.

Tools that can be used to identify internal phishing
1. King Phisher/Gophish (open-source phishing platforms)
2. Evilginx2 (AiTM credential aggregator)
3. Custom LLM-generated phishing templates (ChatGPT/Claude)

Example of a practical application: The red team sent a phishing email via Gophish (Urgent Board Deck Review, please approve before the EOD [link]). The display name on the spoofed email came from the CEO and the spoofed from email address was from the company internal domain. The results of this simulated attack yielded credentials being captured from 28% of all users (2 finance users and 1 sysadmin) in under 4 hours.

Lesson: A yearly phishing training program isn't sufficient. In order to reduce the risk associated with internal phishing attacks, DMARC + BIMI should be implemented as well as sender verification should be strictly enforced and realistic internal phishing simulations should occur every quarter.

5. IAM for Clouds and Secrets Are a Treasure Trove 
The reveal Environmentally, the misconfigured IAM roles, service key and secrets discovered in code/repos are still the quickest avenue for total compromise of the cloud.
Tools That Uncover This 
1. CloudSploit / Prowler / ScoutSuite (no cost for cloud scans)
2. TruffleHog / Git-Secrets (secrets contained within repositories)
3. Pacu / SkyArk (abuse IAM of AWS / Azure)

Practical example: Prowler scan found an S3 bucket with public read ACL containing Terraform state files → attacker extracted AWS keys → escalated to full account takeover via IAM role assumption.

Lesson: Run automated cloud security posture scans weekly. Rotate keys aggressively. Never commit secrets to code,  use vault solutions.

Practical Tools to Start Seeing These Issues Yourself
1. Nmap + vulners , quick external view
nmap -sV --script vulners 192.168.1.0/24

2. BloodHound CE , AD attack path visualization (free)
3. Prowler , AWS/Azure/GCP security posture (free)
prowler aws --check-all

4. Gophish , internal phishing simulation (free)
5. Responder , capture NTLM hashes from legacy protocols (free)
6. TruffleHog , secrets in Git history (free)

Key Takeaways
Red team tools don’t just find bugs, they expose operational truths:
1. Legacy systems are still everywhere
2. MFA is often weak or missing where it matters
3. Privilege is over-granted
4. Internal phishing still works
5. Cloud keys/secrets are left exposed

Run at least one free scanner (OpenVAS, Prowler, BloodHound CE) on your own environment this month. Fix the red/high/critical items first. The goal isn’t zero findings, it’s eliminating the paths attackers actually use.