Challenge
The client, one of Europe's largest banking groups, needed to validate their security operations center's ability to detect and respond to sophisticated, multi-stage attacks. Previous penetration tests had focused on individual systems, but never tested the full kill chain from initial access to data exfiltration.
Approach
Crimson7 designed a realistic adversary simulation based on known financial sector threat actors (FIN7, Carbanak). The engagement spanned 6 weeks and included:
- Open-source intelligence gathering and social engineering reconnaissance
- Targeted phishing with custom payloads bypassing email security controls
- Lateral movement through Active Directory trust relationships
- Simulated data exfiltration from core banking systems
Results
The red team successfully compromised the target environment through a supply chain vector, achieving domain administrator privileges within 72 hours. Twelve critical detection gaps were identified in the client's SIEM correlation rules, and the SOC team failed to detect lateral movement for the first 5 days.
Post-engagement, Crimson7 worked with the bank's detection engineering team to implement 23 new detection rules, reducing mean time to detect from 14 days to under 48 hours in follow-up validation testing.