A practical, detection-aware guide to designing and building custom red team tools that survive in modern enterprise environments. Red Team Toolcraft teaches offensive and defensive security professionals how to reason about tooling behavior through the lens of SIEMs, EDRs, and logging pipelines, and how to use that insight to build bespoke tools engineered for evasion rather than convenience.
Modern enterprises are saturated with telemetry. Endpoint agents, centralized logging, behavioral analytics, and automated detections have made off-the-shelf red team tools increasingly brittle and predictable.
Most red team tools fail not because they're buggy, but because they behave in ways detection systems are designed to notice. Red Team Toolcraft teaches readers how to think, design, and build differently.
Instead of showing how to run popular frameworks, this book focuses on how offensive tools actually behave in monitored environments and why that behavior so often gives them away. The authors walk readers through the foundations of detection-aware tool design, explaining how payload structure, execution flow, and environmental interaction influence visibility across modern detection stacks.
Each chapter centers on modular, adaptable examples that show not just what works, but why it works. Readers learn how small design decisions surface in logs, alerts, and behavioral analytics, and how thoughtful toolcraft can reduce detection while still achieving realistic adversary objectives.
The result is a field-ready reference for red teamers who need to build their own tools when public ones fail, and for detection engineers and threat hunters who want a clearer view of how advanced operators design tooling to evade automated defenses. Dennis Chow is an experienced practitioner in penetration testing, cloud security, security engineering, and detection engineering. He has supported offensive and defensive cybersecurity teams at Amazon Web Services and consulted for multiple Fortune 500 companies and U.S. government agencies. He holds GIAC Security Expert certification #288 along with GXPN, GREM, and numerous other credentials.
Michael LaSalvia is an information security leader with more than two decades of experience in offensive security, red teaming, and penetration testing. He has built and led advanced adversary simulation and red team programs for global enterprises including Fidelity National Financial, KPMG, Pfizer, and GSK, and holds certifications such as OSCP, GXPN, GCIH, GMOB, and CISSP.
