E-commerce

Red Team Engagement Exposes Full Kill Chain at a High-Growth Quick-Commerce Operator

Physical + digital attack simulation reveals path from lobby to production database in under 48 hours

Client: Leading Quick-Commerce Platform

48 hrs

Time to achieve production DB access from initial physical entry

Critical findings including 3 zero-day-equivalent misconfigurations

100%

Critical and high findings remediated before IPO filing

12M+

Customer records that were accessible via the attack chain

The Challenge

Board-Mandated Red Team Assessment Before IPO Roadshow

A $5B+ quick-commerce unicorn preparing for IPO needed an independent red team assessment to validate their security posture. Previous penetration tests had returned clean reports, but the CISO suspected their defenses had never been truly tested against a motivated adversary simulating real-world attack tactics.

Previous VAPT reports showed low-severity findings only — board skeptical of results
500+ microservices across 3 cloud regions with no unified access control
Physical security at 4 dark stores and 2 office locations never assessed
IPO due diligence required evidence of adversarial testing

The Solution

Full-Spectrum Red Team: Physical Intrusion + Social Engineering + Network Exploitation

Security Brigade deployed a 6-person red team over 3 weeks, combining physical intrusion attempts, targeted social engineering campaigns, and advanced network exploitation. The engagement followed the MITRE ATT&CK framework mapped to the client threat model, with B-52 engine coordinating all attack paths for complete coverage tracking.

Services used

red-team social-engineering network-pt vapt

Our approach

01 Week 1: OSINT reconnaissance — mapped 847 employee LinkedIn profiles, identified 23 high-value targets, discovered 3 leaked credentials on dark web
02 Week 2: Physical intrusion at HQ via tailgating + USB drop attack; spear phishing campaign targeting DevOps team with fake CI/CD alert
03 Week 3: Pivoted from compromised developer workstation to VPN credential extraction to staging environment to production database via misconfigured service mesh
04 Documented full kill chain with video evidence, remediation roadmap prioritised by exploitability

The Results

Full Production Database Access Achieved — 23 Critical Findings Remediated Before IPO

The red team achieved the ultimate objective — production database access containing 12M+ customer records — through a chained attack starting from a physical USB drop. All 23 critical findings were remediated and verified within 6 weeks via Lemon platform.