Translating red team insights into board-level strategic guidance

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Executive Summary

Red team exercises provide CISOs with a "litmus test" of their organization's true security posture. However, the technical findings from these exercises (vulnerabilities exploited, lateral movement paths, privilege escalations, etc.) must be reframed into business terms to inform board-level strategy. This report presents global best practices for bridging that gap. Key insights include:

• Align Red Teaming with Business Objectives: Leading frameworks emphasize focusing on critical assets ("crown jewels") and scenarios derived from real threat intelligence. Board involvement from the planning phase through remediation is crucial.

• Translate Technical Findings into Risk Narratives: Effective CISOs convert exploits and gaps into narratives about potential business impact, backed by quantified scenarios.

• Communicate in Financial and Strategic Terms: Boards respond to metrics like financial impact, operational downtime, and brand damage. Progressive security leaders use cyber risk quantification to express risk in dollars and probabilities.

• Link to Compliance and Regulatory Frameworks: Red team results should be mapped to regulatory obligations and key performance indicators.

• Use Visualizations and Storytelling: Presenting red team outcomes via intuitive visuals and concise storytelling dramatically improves board comprehension.

• Provide Actionable Remediation and Strategic Investment: Boards expect not just identification of risks, but a plan to fix them with clear prioritization and resource needs.

By following these practices, CISOs can turn red team technical assessments into executive-ready intelligence. This empowers the board to make informed decisions on cybersecurity investments, strategy adjustments, and risk acceptance in line with the organization's appetite and obligations.

Introduction: Bridging Cybersecurity Tactics to Business Strategy

Chief Information Security Officers often face the challenge of translating highly technical cyber risk insights into the language of business. Nowhere is this more apparent than in red team exercises – full-scope simulated attacks that uncover vulnerabilities and test an organization's detection and response. These exercises yield a trove of technical data: unpatched systems exploited, credentials cracked, "dwell time" undetected on the network, etc. While invaluable to security teams, such findings can seem arcane to board members unless framed correctly.

A McKinsey analysis of cybersecurity governance notes that boards today ask more pointed questions: "Are we protected against the threats that could truly disrupt our business? How do we know our security investments are working?" Red teaming, when communicated well, is emerging as a "silver bullet" for CISOs, providing concrete evidence to answer these questions. This report distills the latest global best practices on how to convey red team results in a way that resonates with executives – focusing on strategic implications, financial and regulatory risk, and actionable improvements.

Global Best Practices in Red Team Exercises

Intelligence-Led Scenarios

Modern red team frameworks around the world (e.g., Europe's TIBER-EU, UK's CBEST, Singapore's AASE) converge on a common principle: use threat intelligence to drive testing. Rather than arbitrary hacking, the exercise targets the organization's most critical assets and likely threat actors. For example, if ransomware attacks are a top concern, the red team will emulate a ransomware gang's techniques end-to-end. This ensures the findings are immediately relevant to the business's threat landscape.

As one expert put it, "Boards wanted to know if they were spending money on the right things… nothing was as satisfying as running a real-world ransomware simulation mapped to an adversary's TTPs and seeing how we fared." Aligning red team objectives to business priorities (such as protecting customer data, ensuring uptime of a trading platform, etc.) is a best practice globally. It connects the dots between technical weaknesses and what the organization values most.

Executive and Board Engagement

A striking lesson from financial-sector red team programs is the importance of senior leadership buy-in. The Bank for International Settlements notes that board and senior management involvement "sets the tone" for how red team test outcomes are treated and acted upon. In effective programs, boards actively support these exercises, allocating resources to fix issues and not punishing the messengers. The board is often part of the "white team" overseeing the test (ensuring it's controlled and safe) and is heavily involved in post-exercise remediation oversight.

Crucially, leadership must foster a culture where findings are viewed as opportunities for improvement rather than embarrassments. "The board and senior management should regard weaknesses discovered by the red team as lessons to be learned and addressed rather than mistakes," according to global guidance. This encourages honest disclosure of vulnerabilities and swift action, rather than burying the report. In practice, companies that treat red team results as strategic input (similar to a market analysis or audit findings) are able to improve their cyber resilience faster.

Holistic Test and Respond Cycle

Best practices don't end when the red team "attack" ends. Top organizations have a defined post-red-team process: immediate debriefs with the defenders (blue team) to examine what was missed, followed by a joint development of a remediation plan. The plan typically categorizes fixes into quick wins vs. longer-term strategic fixes. For instance, quickly closing an exposed port or updating a password policy might be done in days, whereas network segmentation to contain lateral movement might be a months-long project.

A senior oversight committee (often including board members or their delegates) is established to track remediation progress, remove roadblocks, and maintain momentum. By treating remediation like a project with funding and accountability – rather than an ad-hoc IT task – firms ensure the red team exercise leads to tangible risk reduction. In subsequent board meetings, CISOs can then report not just the exercise results but the improvements made, demonstrating a proactive stance. This "find and fix" cycle is a hallmark of mature security programs worldwide.

Reality Check on Risk Posture

Red teaming provides a reality-based validation (or refutation) of the organization's presumed security posture. Traditional risk assessments and control dashboards often suffer from optimism or false assurance. In contrast, a red team exercise delivers ground truth. As Deloitte's CISO observed, red teaming serves as a "reality check" or "litmus test" that reveals the true state of defenses, cutting through any bias.

This can be eye-opening for executives. For example, an organization might believe its crown jewels are well protected by multi-factor authentication and network monitoring, only to have a red team demonstrate a way to silently bypass those controls. Such revelations help recalibrate risk priorities. Global best practice is to incorporate red team findings into the enterprise risk register and adjust risk ratings accordingly. Many organizations now schedule regular red team exercises (e.g., annually or quarterly on different scopes) as part of their risk management program, akin to regular financial audits.

From Exploit to Business Impact: Crafting the Narrative

A core skill for a CISO is storytelling – translating technical exploits into a compelling narrative about business risk. Red team reports should lead with an executive summary that answers, in plain language, three fundamental questions: What happened? Why does it matter? What should we do about it? This section of the report (and the accompanying presentation to leadership) must distill the technical details into salient points that any board member can grasp.

High-Level Framing

The executive summary focuses on the business impact of the red team's findings. Rather than saying "Our team exploited a misconfigured S3 bucket and exfiltrated data", the report might state: "An adversary could gain access to customer financial records due to a cloud storage misconfiguration, potentially leading to exposure of 5 million records and significant reputational damage." The technical specifics can be left to appendices – the top of the report highlights the consequences and risk in terms of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical business assets.

As guidance for red team reporting notes, an Executive Summary should provide a high-level overview of the threat exercise and focus on what the business implications are, not the technical minutiae. It should answer: would this scenario cause financial loss, regulatory non-compliance, operational downtime, loss of customer trust, or safety issues? By front-loading impact and risk, CISOs ensure they have the board's attention from the start.

Analogies and Scenarios

Another powerful technique is using analogies or scenarios that resonate with business leaders. For instance, describing a chain of exploits as "a burglar who found an unlocked window (phishing email), then a master key in the lobby (domain admin credentials stored plaintext), and freely roamed our offices (network) undetected for weeks." Such narrative devices translate cybersecurity into familiar physical or business terms.

Many effective CISO presentations recount the red team exercise as a story of a hypothetical breach: "Imagine an organized crime group targeted our company. First, they... Then they... Ultimately, they were able to reach our crown jewels – here's what that would mean for us." This approach can be far more impactful than raw statistics. Storytelling helps the board visualize the threat: seeing, for example, how a phishing email led to a foothold, which led to lateral movement into sensitive systems, and so on, makes the abstract threat concrete.

Avoiding Jargon

In communicating to the board, simplicity is key. Reports should "avoid technical jargon when unnecessary." If technical terms must be mentioned, they should be immediately explained in business terms. For example, "privilege escalation" might be parenthetically clarified as "(gaining higher access that could allow an attacker to control critical systems)". A useful test is to have a non-IT person read the executive summary – if they can't follow it, it likely needs simplification.

One CISO in a Fortune 50 company advises: "Translate security metrics into something the board cares about – operational and financial impact – not server uptime percentages or number of patches applied." By speaking the language of the board (risk, impact, dollars, and strategy), CISOs ensure the message lands.

Focus on What Matters

A red team engagement may uncover dozens of issues, but not all are board-relevant. Effective reports prioritize the findings. They highlight the handful of critical issues that materially elevate risk to the enterprise. Supporting detail on lower-risk findings can be included in a supplemental "technical report" for the IT/security team. The board deck, however, should stick to the top risks and themes.

For instance, the board doesn't need to know about every outdated software version found, but they do need to know if "our incident response failed to detect an intruder for 10 days" or "an obsolete encryption method could allow a major data breach." One recommended approach is to group findings into categories of risk – e.g., Identity & Access Gaps, Detection Failures, Process/Policy Gaps, etc. – to show systemic issues.

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