Organisational Resilience and Adversarial Security Clarity

OnyxTrace's GreyTeam brand focuses on objective insight into your real-world exposure — not on selling remediation. We work with organisations that want to understand how their people, processes, and financial structures can be exploited, far beyond standard compliance. Our work spans the full spectrum of security, cybersecurity, and information security concerns.

Understanding the Security Landscape

Building a resilient security programme (sometimes called a cybersecurity or information security programme) involves two distinct types of effort: the teams responsible for daily security operations, and the specialist teams engaged to challenge and validate those operations. Understanding this distinction is key to seeing where your true exposure lies.

The Foundational Teams: Your Everyday Security Operations

Most organisations have a set of teams that form the backbone of their information security posture. These are the groups responsible for the continuous, day-to-day work of building, maintaining, and governing your defences. This operational core includes:

• The Blue Team – The frontline defence, monitoring systems and responding to threats.
• The White Team – Handles policy, governance, and compliance, setting the rules for the entire organisation.
• The Yellow Team – Risk analysts who identify weak points and plan strategies to mitigate business impact.
• The Green Team – Optimises and streamlines security procedures to ensure operational efficiency.
• The Orange Team – Safeguards the organisation's physical assets and infrastructure.

Together, these teams create and manage your established security framework. But is the framework as strong as it appears on paper?

The Specialist Teams: Testing Your Real-World Resilience

To find the answer, organisations engage specialist teams for focused, adversarial assessments. These teams are not part of "everyday business"; their purpose is to provide a fresh, objective perspective on your actual exposure by thinking and acting like a threat actor. This category includes three key specialists:

• The Red Team – Acts as a strategic adversary, simulating an external attacker to probe technical defences and test response capabilities. Their goal is to find gaps before a real attacker does.
• The Black Team – A highly technical and covert team that imitates the methods of actual threat actors, often without the target's knowledge or cooperation. They use advanced tactics and exploits to uncover deep technical vulnerabilities in cybersecurity defences.
• The Grey Team – Operating as an infiltrator, this team works mostly from the inside of the company to evaluate internal dangers. Unlike the Red Team’s external focus, their exercises concentrate on the human factor, insider threat assessments, and social engineering to address threats that arise from within an organisation’s own ranks.

Our Approach: Real-World Adversarial Clarity

Our operating approach is to employ any means an adversary would to identify, take control of, and weaponise threats against your organisation. To do this effectively, our methodology begins from an insider's perspective, much like a traditional Grey Team. We embed ourselves within your organisation to understand how your people, processes, and financial structures can be exploited. Unlike our technical operations, our approach to financial risk is purely analytical. Adopting the mindset of an adversary seeking to exploit the system, we scrutinise contracts, payment flows, and partnerships for anomalies that indicate fraud, waste, or hidden risk. This allows us to focus on the human factor, assess insider threats, and identify gaps in your everyday procedures that go far beyond standard compliance checks.

A critical part of this work requires us to operate covertly, as our role is often intentionally ambiguous to most employees, contractors, and even management. This stealth approach allows us to observe how the organisation truly functions without altering behaviour. This same covert, adversarial mindset is then amplified when we adopt the perspective of an external attacker. Like a Black Team, we use advanced tactics, develop our own exploits (0-days), and work to compromise your technical systems to uncover deep vulnerabilities that challenge their fundamental assumptions.

By combining the deep insider context of a Grey Team with the technical, adversarial methods of a Black Team, our work moves beyond theoretical tests. We act like real adversaries to gather tangible evidence and proof of your organisation's actual, real-world exposure. This objective insight is then reported to you, providing the clarity needed to support your own teams in their efforts to investigate and mitigate the threats we uncover. We don't sell fixes; we provide clarity.

To provide this clarity, our investigations focus on several key areas where real-world risk often hides:

• Insider Threat: We move beyond policy to do what a malicious insider or compromised partner could actually achieve, demonstrating tangible impact on your operations and data.
• Process & Financial Exploitation: From an adversarial viewpoint, we can scrutinise workflows, contracts, and payment flows to uncover and exploit gaps that lead to fraud, waste, and hidden liabilities.
• Insider Technical Attacks: We combine our insider context with a Black Team's technical capabilities, allowing us to develop bespoke exploits (0-days) that target your most critical systems with precision.
• Human-Centric Vulnerability Testing: We test your true resilience against social engineering and other human-focused attacks, demonstrating how your people can become the bypass for even the most advanced technical controls.
• Evidence-Based Risk Clarity: We deliver objective proof of your real-world exposure. Our findings provide the clarity needed to direct your internal teams, without the conflict of interest from selling remediation services.