Cymrix vs Stratus Red Team

Cymrix is a cloud, agent-based breach and attack simulation platform for measuring and improving cyber resilience. It simulates ransomware activity to assess prevention and detection tools, while Attack Path Validation uses the MITRE framework to discover and visualize routes an attacker could take through systems and accounts. Coverage includes networks, Windows Active Directory and IoT devices. The platform identifies exploitable vulnerabilities, incorrect configurations, obtainable credentials and product defaults. Reports show step-by-step lateral attack paths and offer guidance on data separation, network segmentation and user permissions. Deployment starts with a lightweight agent on a designated “Patient Zero” device. Its Ransomware Impact Assessment is a consultative engagement combining evaluation, training, customized simulations and reporting; simulations run across the cyber kill chain on one customer-selected Windows device. Listed uses include posture assessment, training, third-party risk, incident response testing and insurance-related ransomware assessment. Pricing is on request and there is no free plan.

Stratus Red Team is a free, open-source Go binary for running specific offensive attack techniques against a live cloud environment and checking detections. Its techniques map to MITRE ATT&CK, with coverage for AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, and Entra ID. For each technique, it can prepare prerequisites, detonate the activity, reverse side effects, and remove prerequisites. Terraform creates and removes required infrastructure, and Stratus downloads its own Terraform binary. Installation options include Go, Homebrew, pre-built Linux, Windows, and macOS binaries, and Docker. The tool can also operate as a Go library for automation and custom techniques. It supports Linux, macOS, Windows, API use, and self-hosting. Documentation recommends an administrator role in a sandbox account or test cluster, not production infrastructure. Kubernetes clusters must already exist, AWS customer-provided detonation infrastructure is unsupported, and Azure resources are fixed to West US.