BAS vs Automated Pentesting: Scaling Red Team Operations with Automation

Red teaming is a critical practice that provides defenders with a real-world view of how attackers might compromise systems by mimicking adversary behavior across the attack chain. However, running red team operations is no small feat. They are time-intensive, resource-heavy, and often require highly specialized expertise.

As security programs mature, the need to scale red teaming becomes clear. Organizations can no longer afford to wait for annual or ad hoc engagements to uncover exposures. Instead, they require frequent, consistent offensive testing that reflects the evolving threat landscape without exhausting budgets.

Adversarial Exposure Validation (AEV) answers this challenge with its two core technologies: Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and Automated Penetration Testing. These solutions offer scalable, repeatable ways to emulate attacker behavior and serve as force multipliers, allowing organizations to automate and customize red team operations at scale.

In this fifth installment of our "BAS vs Automated Pentesting" series, we explore why traditional red teaming is difficult to scale, how BAS and Automated Pentesting help bridge that gap, and how they compare in delivering tailored automated offensive testing.

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The Complexity of Running Red Team Operations

Traditional red team exercises are notoriously difficult to scale for several reasons.

First, they heavily rely on human expertise. Red teamers must think like adversaries, identifying weak spots, chaining vulnerabilities, and navigating complex, dynamic environments. This demands not only technical skills but also creativity and a deep understanding of target systems, making skilled red teamers hard to find and expensive to retain.

Second, red team engagements are resource and time intensive. Planning, executing, and reporting on even a single exercise can take weeks. Moreover, these engagements typically offer only a snapshot of an organization's security posture at a specific point in time. In fast-changing environments like cloud or hybrid networks, that snapshot can quickly become outdated.

Third, there is a lack of repeatability. While human red teams excel at finding unknown risks and sophisticated vulnerabilities, their work is often bespoke and crafted for a specific engagement and difficult to standardize or automate for continuous use.

As Gartner notes in their Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation, "Frequent and consistent offensive testing is essential, but it is complex to orchestrate and requires specific skill sets. Technologies are necessary to reduce the level of skill and complexity required to orchestrate offensive testing".

This is precisely where BAS and Automated Pentesting come into play, offering scalable ways to operationalize offensive testing without overwhelming security teams.

How BAS and Automated Pentesting Enable Scalable and Customizable Red Team Automation

Both BAS and Automated Penetration Testing solutions offer distinct, powerful approaches to automating offensive testing and scaling red team capabilities across the organization.

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) solutions simulate a wide array of known and emerging TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) across multiple layers to evaluate whether an organization's defenses detect, block, or respond at each stage of an attack.

A key differentiator for modern BAS solutions is their customization and extensibility. Through attack scenario creation workbenches, red teamers can put their technical knowledge into reusable automated threat templates. Using drag-and-drop interfaces, predefined techniques from frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, and even custom scripting capabilities, teams can quickly build, modify, and execute complex scenarios without deep coding expertise​. This enables security teams to efficiently build and iterate on sophisticated scenarios tailored to reflect industry-specific risks, emerging threats, or organizational priorities and to run them continuously and repeatably across the production environment.

Automated Penetration Testing solutions focus on depth and exploitation realism. Rather than validating against individual threats, Automated Pentesting solutions emulate full attacker workflows, chaining together vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to demonstrate impact. They simulate realistic attack paths, such as privilege escalation, lateral movement, and domain takeover, providing detailed insights into which accounts, assets or data were compromised. These simulations can start from any point in the network without needing constant manual guidance.

Comparing BAS and Automated Pentesting in Custom Red Team Operations

While both BAS and Automated Pentesting dramatically extend red teaming capabilities through automation, they differ significantly in their focus, operational behavior, and the way they empower organizations to build and scale offensive testing strategies.

Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) focuses on the repeatable execution of individual threats and offers customization through its Threat Builder capabilities. BAS allows red teams to create, modify, and continuously execute specific attack techniques or full kill chains in a modular way. Each technique is treated as an individual building block, which can be tested repeatedly across environments without disrupting operations.

The strength of BAS lies in its granular control, flexibility, and reusability. Security teams can model specific threats, industry-relevant attack vectors, or newly emerging adversary techniques without any coding involved. Once created, custom scenarios can be run as often as needed, making BAS ideal for organizations looking to operationalize red teaming at scale and perform frequent, precise validation of their detection and prevention capabilities.

Automated Penetration Testing, by contrast, emphasizes autonomous, attacker-driven exploration. Rather than selecting a specific threat to simulate, Automated Pentesting solutions are designed to operate independently once launched. They start from any defined point in the network and autonomously navigate through the environment, chaining vulnerabilities, escalating privileges, and reaching critical assets.

This goal-oriented behavior provides deep, contextual insights into how far an attacker could go and what potential damage they could cause if defenses fail. Automated Pentesting is less about verifying if a single tactic is detected, and more about mapping complete attack paths based on real-world adversary strategies.

In essence, BAS acts as a precision instrument for tuning, validating, and monitoring individual defenses continuously, while Automated Pentesting behaves like an autonomous red team charting realistic attacker paths through your environment without needing constant manual input.

What's Next

In this fifth entry of our "BAS vs Automated Pentesting" series, we explored how BAS and Automated Pentesting transform traditional red team operations enabling scalable, repeatable, and customizable offensive testing through automation.

In the next post, we'll shift focus to a critical aspect of maintaining security maturity: baselining and tracking your security posture over time. We'll examine how BAS and Automated Pentesting help organizations detect configuration drift, measure improvements, and build a consistent, data-driven exposure validation program that supports long-term resilience.

Stay with us as we continue to unpack how BAS and Automated Pentesting strengthen every layer of a modern security validation strategy.