In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, being reactive is no longer enough. Developers, DevSecOps teams, and security engineers must adopt a proactive mindset, testing how real-world attackers might exploit their systems, and validating whether their defenses can detect, contain, and respond. That’s where Atomic Red Team becomes an indispensable tool.
Atomic Red Team is an open-source adversary emulation framework created by Red Canary that enables you to simulate real attack techniques directly mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Whether you’re a security-minded developer, a blue teamer validating detection, or a red team practitioner simulating advanced persistent threats (APT), Atomic Red Team makes red teaming accessible, effective, and efficient.
This blog dives deep into how Atomic Red Team works, how developers can integrate it into their workflow, and how it significantly improves detection capability, threat visibility, and the overall security posture, without the cost or complexity of full-scale adversary emulation platforms.
What Is Atomic Red Team?
Lightweight yet powerful adversary emulation
Atomic Red Team is a curated library of small, self-contained attack scripts (called “atomics”) that simulate real attacker behaviors. Each atomic test maps to a specific technique in the MITRE ATT&CK matrix, ensuring that your simulation aligns with industry-recognized adversarial tactics and techniques.
Each atomic test:
- Requires minimal environment setup
- Is often a single command or script (PowerShell, BAT, Python, Shell)
- Has a well-documented YAML definition
- Includes dependencies, input arguments, and expected outcomes
Unlike traditional red team operations, which can require weeks of planning, custom scripting, and advanced infrastructure, Atomic Red Team democratizes this process, making attack simulation available to everyone from individual developers to enterprise SOC teams.
This approach brings adversary emulation closer to development and CI/CD workflows, enabling continuous security testing, threat detection validation, and hands-on security education.
Why Developers Should Love It
Seamless integration into modern development workflows
Traditionally, red teaming has been the domain of specialized security professionals working on isolated test networks. But with Atomic Red Team, developers can run red team tests as part of their day-to-day development workflow, on local machines, in isolated environments, or even during build/test stages of CI pipelines.
Here’s why Atomic Red Team is especially valuable to developers:
- Minimal setup and small footprint: Each atomic test is self-contained, typically consisting of a few lines of code or commands. Developers can run these without setting up complex infrastructures, containers, or external tools.
- Scriptable and automatable: Atomics can be triggered using PowerShell (Invoke-Atomic) or Python (atomic-operator), allowing developers to incorporate them into automation scripts, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code setups.
- Fast execution, quick feedback: Most atomic tests run within seconds or minutes, making it easy for developers to identify telemetry gaps, log inconsistencies, or misconfigured endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.
- Low overhead with high realism: Despite their small size, each atomic mimics real-world attacker behavior, from credential dumping to lateral movement, giving developers accurate visibility into what would happen in a real attack.
Developers increasingly share responsibility for security. With Atomic Red Team, they gain a hands-on red teaming toolset to understand attacker techniques, improve detection coverage, and participate in threat modeling and blue team efforts without relying solely on security teams.
How to Get Started: PowerShell with Invoke-Atomic
A guided walk-through to run simulations on Windows
PowerShell is one of the most common entry points for using Atomic Red Team on Windows-based systems. The Invoke-AtomicRedTeam script is an official PowerShell module that makes it simple to install, configure, and run atomics.
Step-by-step guide for developers:
- Prepare your test environment
Never run atomics directly on your production systems. Instead, set up:
- A Windows virtual machine (e.g., via Hyper-V, VMware, or VirtualBox)
- Snapshot capability to revert after tests
- Monitoring tools like Sysmon, Event Viewer, Wazuh, or commercial EDRs to observe the results
- Install Invoke-Atomic and atomics library
Open PowerShell as administrator:
IEX (IWR 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redcanaryco/invoke-atomicredteam/master/install-atomicredteam.ps1' -UseBasicParsing);
Install-AtomicRedTeam -getAtomics
- Run your first atomic test
Let’s simulate Process Injection (T1055):
Invoke-AtomicTest T1055 -TestNumbers 1 - Analyze the results
Use your endpoint logging tools to examine telemetry generated by the attack:
- Were suspicious behaviors logged?
- Did your EDR flag it?
- Were alerts generated in SIEM?
- Tweak and rerun
Adjust configurations, apply new detection rules, then re-run atomics to validate changes.
With Invoke-Atomic, even junior developers can simulate a wide range of adversary actions in a matter of minutes, understanding how malware behaves and how to spot it before it causes harm.
How to Get Started: Python with atomic-operator
Platform-agnostic simulation for cross-platform workflows
For developers working on Linux, macOS, or cloud-native environments, or those who prefer scripting in Python, the atomic-operator library is a powerful alternative to PowerShell.
How to begin with Python-based attack simulation:
- Install atomic-operator
pip install atomic-operator - Download atomics
atomic-operator get_atomics - Run a test
atomic-operator run --technique T1112
This simulates modification of registry values, common in persistence attacks.
- Monitor system changes and logs
Use auditd, journald, system logs, or EDR integrations to validate detection logic and response mechanisms.
Atomic-operator is especially valuable for:
- Testing container environments
- Validating telemetry in cloud workloads
- Automating scheduled simulations across hybrid systems
It enables cross-platform adversary emulation, allowing red and blue teams to collaborate more effectively regardless of underlying OS.
Advantages Over Traditional Red Teaming
Why modern teams prefer atomic testing
While traditional red team engagements are still valuable, they’re often:
- Time-consuming
- Expensive
- Disconnected from daily development
Atomic Red Team, by contrast, brings the power of red teaming to every developer and every sprint. Here’s how it outperforms conventional methods:
- No need for external consultants: Everything is open source. You can simulate real techniques without hiring a red team.
- Immediate validation of controls: You don’t need weeks of engagement. Run a few tests and instantly know if your defenses are working.
- Focused testing: Instead of running a full kill chain, atomics allow granular simulation, targeting a specific technique such as LSASS access or persistence via registry keys.
- Better for agile teams: Atomics can be run as part of unit tests, integration pipelines, or weekly sprints.
Atomic Red Team brings continuous adversary emulation into the daily rhythm of agile development, making it far more actionable than periodic, consultant-led red team engagements.
Benefits for Developers & DevOps Teams
Shift-left security in practice
Atomic Red Team empowers developers and DevOps teams to take proactive ownership of security. It aligns perfectly with the goals of DevSecOps, where security is embedded into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Key developer benefits include:
- Secure coding awareness: Developers gain firsthand knowledge of how attackers exploit legitimate interfaces, like PowerShell or WMI, to perform malicious tasks.
- Faster detection: By simulating threats early, teams can ensure that their log pipelines, EDRs, and SIEM rules are properly configured before software hits production.
- Automation-friendly: Atomics can be scripted as part of pre-deployment security checks, fail builds if telemetry isn't captured, and be used as acceptance tests for detection quality.
- Rapid feedback: Developers can instantly spot gaps in visibility, helping security teams prioritize controls and alerts.
In short, Atomic Red Team turns security from an afterthought into an integrated, testable component of modern software engineering.
Typical Workflow Summary
How to use Atomic Red Team effectively
- Select MITRE techniques relevant to your environment
Use the MITRE ATT&CK navigator or Red Canary’s Atomic Matrix to select relevant techniques (e.g., T1047 - WMI Execution, T1003 - Credential Dumping).
- Run atomic tests using PowerShell or Python
Launch simulations on your dev/test systems using either Invoke-AtomicRedTeam or atomic-operator.
- Review telemetry
Check:
- Endpoint logs (Windows Event Log, Sysmon)
- SIEM platforms (Splunk, ELK)
- EDR solutions (SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Defender)
- Tune detection logic
Update log policies, rule thresholds, alerting configurations, or even upstream code to fix gaps.
- Re-run and validate
Test again to ensure your fixes are effective and haven’t introduced new gaps.
- Repeat weekly or with every release
This makes Atomic Red Team an agile-friendly, continuous testing framework.
Real‑World Use Cases
Developers and SOC teams leveraging Atomics
- CI-integrated red teaming: At many security-first companies, atomic tests are executed in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI pipelines to validate detection and response before merging code.
- Ransomware defense labs: Developers simulate ransomware techniques like registry tampering or service persistence to confirm that their endpoint protection tools catch them.
- Blue team validation: Security teams replay adversary behavior (like MITRE’s APT29 simulations) using atomics to ensure SOC playbooks are accurate and fast.
- Cloud infrastructure hardening: Developers run Linux-specific atomics (e.g., cronjob persistence, bash history tampering) in cloud workloads to detect silent misconfigurations.
These examples show how Atomic Red Team empowers everyone, developer, blue teamer, or incident responder, to build muscle memory for real-world adversary behavior.
Tips & Gotchas
Maximize value, avoid common mistakes
- Never run in production: Atomics may trigger AV/EDR or modify system artifacts. Always use test VMs or sandboxed containers.
- Don’t ignore input arguments: Customizing these helps simulate more realistic, evasive behavior.
- Always snapshot before testing: Especially for techniques involving registry modification, file encryption, or persistence.
- Combine techniques: While atomics are small, chaining them mimics more complex kill chains for even deeper insight.
- Contribute back: Share your improvements or custom tests to benefit the broader open-source security community.
Atomic Red Team redefines how modern teams approach red teaming. With its MITRE ATT&CK-aligned, developer-friendly, open-source attack simulation library, it allows individuals and teams to simulate real-world techniques without the cost, complexity, or overhead of traditional engagements.
Whether you’re writing secure code, validating logging pipelines, testing detection rules, or educating your team, Atomic Red Team is the most accessible and effective framework for developer-led red teaming.
Use it to build security into your culture, not as a gate, but as a guardrail. Red teaming isn’t just for hackers anymore. With Atomic Red Team, it’s for all of us.
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