Hands-On Red Team Tactics: A practical guide to mastering Red Team operations

Red-team work is about assessing security against defined objectives, not simply collecting a long list of vulnerabilities. Hands-On Red Team Tactics connects that broader purpose to practical tools and engagement stages, taking readers from penetration-testing foundations into topics such as pivoting, command-and-control infrastructure, and post-exploitation.

Himanshu Sharma and Harpreet Singh organize the material around tools and operational techniques, with chapter summaries, questions, and further reading to help readers review the concepts. It is written for practitioners who already have some penetration-testing knowledge and want to study red-team workflows in authorized assessments.

From testing methodology to red-team objectives

The opening chapters contrast penetration testing with red teaming and introduce established assessment methodologies, including the Penetration Testing Execution Standard. The emphasis on planning, reconnaissance, threat modeling, and rules of engagement gives the technical chapters a context: tools and actions belong within a scoped, purposeful engagement.

Explore a practitioner’s toolkit

The book introduces Metasploit and Armitage before turning to Cobalt Strike and Empire. Readers encounter setup and operation topics, listeners and beacons, team servers, payloads, and post-exploitation workflows. The sequence helps situate individual tools within the larger process rather than presenting them as isolated utilities.

Understand connections, pivoting, and infrastructure

Separate chapters examine reverse connections and shells, including encrypted approaches, as well as pivoting through SSH and other methods. Later material covers command-and-control concepts, redirectors, persistence, and data exfiltration—subjects that show how the parts of an engagement can connect across systems and networks.

For security practitioners building on existing skills

This title is intended for IT professionals, penetration testers, security consultants, and ethical hackers; prior penetration-testing knowledge is beneficial. Its examples center on tools and practices presented in a 2018 publication, so readers should check current documentation and use the techniques only within explicitly authorized environments and agreed rules of engagement.